News November 2015

Time lost – Time spent

When significant emotional events occur in our lives they can derail the thought process, leaving us to live in a fog, a void – out of place. No one can prepare us for such times, only the event can give us the experience. Only time can bring the ability to deal with the problem and come out of the fog. Clear, but changed. In no specific way, but certainly changed forever. Even the time is different for the individual. A week. A month. A year. Ever?

The significance of being uprooted from the comfort of home, its familiarity, thrust into a world where language, culture, and even the weather is so different, also must bring this void experience with it. How long will it take the refugees, the immigrants, to adjust? Will those, who have lost family members, ever recover?

Those of us who have suffered the loss of a loved one can understand the fog, the void. We can lend a helping hand of friendship, love and respect. We can not replace the loss, but hope for peace after the storm, for the fog to lift, clarity to come – and for joy to replace the pain.

Time lost – that precious time, when we go inside ourselves in an attempt to make sense of senseless, to comprehend the incomprehensible, and come to a point of acceptance of the event. An understanding, that nothing we can do can change that moment. The grey clouds lift, daylight pushes through, and sunshine replaces the rain. Now we are ready to go again, to take up where we left off, but with a new understanding of the frailty of life and the importance of time. Now we are ready to rejoin society. One that may have no knowledge of our personal circumstances. It does not matter. It is not important. We rejoin anyway.

‘There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternally new now that builds and creates itself out of the Best as the past withdraws.’  (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749 – 1832)