Loss

Loss :

At the temple, there is a poem called "Loss", carved into the stone. It has three words...but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read "Loss"... Only feel it.

Sayuri ( Memoirs of Geisha )

Everyone of us eventually dies. But its just that few stop breathing long time after they are dead.

What and how much transpires from the human soul decides our lifetime. And then we remain with nothing but a loss.

What we call the process of growing up is actually a shift in our focus of viewing things and seeing them from new perspectives.  If we would have grieved for the loss itself, we would have had been more peace with ourselves. What makes us restless is what we remain with, after the loss.

A child cries for a lost pencil but doesn’t miss it after few hours and hence is not scarred for lifetime. A lost companion, a lost opportunity makes us grieve not for the moment of loss, or object of loss but at the moments when we experience the loss. When we realize that it should not have been the way it is, but the way we expected, wanted, hoped, wished or dreamt it to be, it is then the feeling of loss hits us the worst. This ability to hang on in the past while with other foot in present and sight at future is what we call growing up.  This is what “becoming a man / woman” does to us. We loose the innocence to cry for the loss and focus our crying on what we remain after the loss.  No wonder the bitterest tears are shed over the words left unsaid. Because they are the tears of a scarred soul. They are tears of a person who has not just had a loss, but has chosen to experience loss for every passing moment for rest of his life.

When two people come together, they become part of each other. But when they separate they take this part of other with themselves too, and leave a part of them behind too. One of them appreciates, grows, lives with the additional part of other, but the other one of them grieves for the missing part of the self. The other person doesn’t acknowledge the left over part of the former but misses out on the part of the self that the other person took away. And life is all about becoming complete, while death is all about losing, deteriorating, disintegrating. And this is how loss takes us a step closer to death.

Though the outcome of loss is death, the beauty of loss is that to experience loss you need to experience being wanted.  Experience  giving. Experience receiving. Experience owning. Experience LOVE.

The choice is ours to make. To live with memories of loss , or to live with memories of Love.