On a Monday in August I opened a letter accepting a paper I had proposed for a conference in Guadalajara. It was among the first pieces of work I had sent anywhere under my own name, and it came back with a yes on the first attempt. What followed surprised me enough that I have been thinking about it since. Grief and change arrived in the same week, and everything that week had gone well.
I have spent my working life in psychology, thirty years of it now, and almost all of that work has gone out under somebody else's letterhead. A university, or an agency, or a program. The work itself I know how to do, and I have done it for a long time in rooms where the outcome mattered. Making a claim on a stranger's attention is a separate act, and I had been avoiding that one for years under the reasonable-sounding cover of being busy.
Sending Work Out Under My Own Name
Three pieces of work went out inside a single week. A journal manuscript, a proposal for a symposium, and the conference paper. Sending them felt less like ambition and more like finally answering a question I had been declining to answer, which was whether the work had a life outside the institutions that had housed it.
The acceptance came back within days. My first reaction was pleasure, and my second was closer to vertigo, and it took me most of that week to understand what the vertigo was about. A refusal would have been familiar. Thirty years inside institutions teaches a person a particular relationship to recognition, where it arrives sparingly, arrives late, and often arrives attached to somebody else's name, and a story grows up around that experience which explains a great deal and asks nothing of you. A yes on the first attempt takes the story away. There is nothing left to argue with and nobody left to wait on, and what remains is the ordinary requirement to prepare the paper and give it well. I registered that same week, before the feeling could talk me out of it.
A Room Where Someone Asks What You Are Doing
The other thing that happened that month is that I went back to a mastermind group. I had been part of one before and let it lapse, in the way these arrangements lapse when nothing at all is wrong with them and the calendar simply fills. Returning was easier than I expected and different from what I remembered, and the difference was what I carried into the room. I sat down with a conference date and a manuscript already sent out, and the conversation had somewhere to go.
What a group like that supplies is people who will ask what you are actually doing, on a schedule, without needing the answer to be impressive. I have coached long enough to know that most people carry their real ambitions alone, and that carrying them alone is what keeps those ambitions at the size of a wish. Saying a date out loud in front of colleagues changes its status, because it becomes something other people now expect of you. That feels like pressure for about a week, and then it feels like company. I doubt any of those three submissions would have left my desk without it.
Why Grief and Change Travel Together
William Bridges made the point that every transition opens with an ending, and that the ending arrives first whether or not the change was chosen. This is the part most people miss about welcome changes, and it is the reason grief and change keep such close company. A conference acceptance ends a version of me who had not yet asked for anything. A book coming out ends the private relationship I have had with a manuscript for two years, since publication makes it a thing readers own, and there is a loss inside that even while it is the entire point of the work.
Grief attaches itself to gains. I have watched this in clinical practice for three decades and I am still surprised by it in my own life. People arrive braced for the sorrow that comes with losses and get ambushed by the sorrow that comes with getting what they wanted. Left unnamed, that sorrow usually gets attributed to something else. Ingratitude, most often, or a creeping suspicion that the thing was never wanted after all, and both of those readings send a person looking for a problem where there is none. The feeling is doing something more useful. It is registering that a familiar arrangement has ended, and it deserves to be read that way.
Once a person starts looking, grief and change show up together everywhere. The promotion that ends the easy friendships of being one of the team. The house bought after years of saving, which ends the version of a life where the money was still available for anything at all. The child who starts school, the degree finished, the recovery that holds, the move to a country a person chose on purpose and loves. Each of these is a gain, and each one closes a door that had been standing open, and the closing registers somewhere whether or not it gets named. People often describe the resulting mood as feeling unsettled for no reason, which is a fair description of grief that has arrived without an invitation and found nobody expecting it.
Naming What Closed
The practice I have been working with is a small one, and it takes about the same amount of time as making coffee. When something opens, I name what closed alongside it. Then I let the mourning have its few minutes without treating those minutes as evidence that I chose wrong. James Hollis writes about the second half of life turning on a change of question, from what the world asks of me to what wants to live through me, and one of the costs of that change is that the earlier answer has to be released. The releasing is where grief and change meet, and skipping it does not make it optional. It only makes it late.
The middle step of the five-step process in A Life Aligned is awareness, and this is what awareness looks like on an ordinary Tuesday. It is noticing the mourning underneath a good outcome and letting the noticing count as information about where you are standing. Awareness of that kind asks for no decision and produces no plan. It simply keeps a person honest about what is happening inside a change, which turns out to be the thing that makes the next step possible. Grief and change stop working against each other once both are allowed in the same room.
I do not know what the coming year holds. There is a second book on the way, an examination ahead of me, and past those sit decisions I have not yet made along with several that are not mine to make. Something in me wants to arrange all of it into a plan, and the plan would be a fiction. What I have instead is a phrase I have been using with myself, which is that I am living in the mystery. As far as I can tell that means declining to resolve the uncertainty prematurely into either optimism or dread, and getting on with the next concrete task while it stays unresolved.
So a question, if you want one to carry into the week. What has opened for you recently that you have not yet allowed yourself to mourn? Give it half an hour before the month is out and see what the half hour tells you.
With care,
Mark
Writing from home in Querétaro