“The ability to lose is not difficult to master,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop in one of the most beautiful poems. “Every mortal loss is an immortal gain,” William Blake wrote two centuries before him in his beautiful letter to a bereaved father.
We dream of immortality because we are creatures created to lose – human death is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation – and it is made to lose: All our creativity, all our forced production, all our poetry and our space telescopes, is a way to face our death, because we will lose everything we need just like everyone who loses everything we need. star in the world.
And yet the measure of life, its meaning, may be precisely what we make of our loss – how we turn the dust of disappointment and decay into clay of creation and self-creation, how we make loss a reason to love fully and live deeply.
That's it Judith Viorst he explores in his comforting 1987 book Necessary Losses (public library) – an investigation into the deep and far-reaching relationship between our losses and our gains, revealing abandonment as part of growth. He paints a great place of loss where life plays out:
When we think about loss we think about the loss, the death, of loved ones. But loss is the most unifying theme in our lives. For we lose not only by death, but also by leaving and being abandoned, by changing and letting go and moving forward. And our loss includes not only our separation and departure from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious loss of dreams of love, expectations of the impossible, the illusion of freedom and power, the illusion of security – and the loss of our little grave, the self that thinks it will always be inevitable and irresistible and immortal.
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This necessary loss… we face when faced with the inescapable truth… that we are actually here alone; that we will have to accept – in other people and in ourselves – a mixture of love and hate, good and bad; … that there are mistakes in all human communication; that our existence on this planet is short-lived; and that we do not have the power to give ourselves or those we love protection – protection from danger and pain, the roads of time, the coming of time, the coming of death; protection from our necessary losses.
This loss is a part of life – everywhere, inevitable, inevitable. And this loss is necessary because we grow by losing and leaving and letting go.
As a painting is shaped by what is taken from the stone, so we are shaped by what we lose – by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of fortune, which takes away as indiscriminately as it gives. Viorst says:
The road to human development is paved with abandonment. Throughout our lives we grow by giving up. We sacrifice some of our deepest attachments to others. We sacrifice certain parts of ourselves that we love. We must face, in the dreams we dream, and in our intimate relationships, all that we cannot have and will not have. Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how smart we are, we have to lose… It is only through our losses that we become fully grown people.
We enter a state of loss when the umbilical cord is cut to sever what Viorst calls “the blurred borderline life of mother-child unity” – the primary loss that establishes the ongoing work of being ourselves. From this origin point, you trace the lifetime vector of losses and gains:
We exchange the illusion of perfect accommodation and perfect security for the triumphant anxieties of standing alone… we become a moral, responsible adult, having found – within the limits set by necessity – our freedom and our choices. And in abandoning our impossible expectations, we become a person connected with love, abandoning ideal ideas of perfect friendship, marriage, children, family life for the sweet imperfection of human relationships. And in the face of the many losses that time and death bring, we become fast and adaptable, we find in every phase – until we take our last breath – opportunities for creative transformation.
With a sentiment the poet Mark Doty will echo – “you need to remember both where love leads and love,” he wrote in his beautiful account of love and loss – he adds:
We cannot love anything deeply without risking loss. And we will not be separate people, responsible people, connected people, thoughtful people without loss and abandonment and letting go.
He is a completer Necessary Losseswhich continues to explore the many regions of loss in human life and how they can be limits to growth, with Hannah Arendt on learning how to live and the basic fear of loss, Thoreau on living with loss, and Alan Watts on learning not to think about gain and loss, and explores two unusual lenses on loss: fractals and chlorophyll.
