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Figurative Loss

Recently, I have suffered some figurative losses. You would think that not being material or tangible they may hurt less but in fact, it can be felt just as strongly if not more. Being in that frame of mind, I found these lines from an article by Olivia Harrison particularly poignant :
"Tragedy is much more of an adventure than joy. I am not saying joy is over-rated. But happiness is fleeting; it exists in the present. Tragedy casts a long and persistent shadow with the power to dim even the most perfect moment. It also has the potential to follow us to the end. We don't stop to analyze happiness but when grief and strife occur we recount the events leading up to it over and over. It wakes us from our sleep as we try to figure out how and where it all went wrong."
She writes this in the context of her husband's George Harrison's imminent death but the idea of raking through the content of tragedy over and over again to make sense of it transfers to the kind of figurative loss I have experienced. There was something then that is gone now. When it was there, it was important but I spent no energy to analyze what I had and what it meant for me. In losing it, indeed the perfectness of my present moment is greatly dimmed.

Comments

Scribby said…
lovely lines....so deep1

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