FilmOnDeepWater

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 11 April 1999

How do I deal with this notion of loss?  What does it mean to lose something or someone?  I remember that poem that David Whyte wrote about – the Native American one about being lost in the forest and how impossible that it.  We cannot be “lost” because we are always somewhere.  It – whatever that “it” is – cannot be lost because it also is somewhere.  Loss is a point of view; it is a position or posture I take in the world.   An inescapable point of view in the moment.  It grabs me.  Holds me.  Creates a powerful reality.  In the moment it is as if there is no other point of view, no other perspective.  There is an illusion to it that says that this is so.  There is no other way for this to be.  It is happening to me.  I have no choice here.

    How could this happen to me? 
    How can I go on without…? 
    Who am I now without…? 
    How do I make sense of what just occurred?
    What will I do now?

When I lose something or someone, who or what is lost?  Am I the one lost?  Is that why it is so effortless for me to focus on what I have lost, rather than the feeling of being lost?  What would happen if I were to move into the feeling of being lost, to hold onto that feeling, to move deeper into it?  Not in some self-pitying way, but as a way of informing me about who I am now that I have just discarded a peripheral self, like a snake shedding its skin.  Another self, more vulnerable, more in touch with my own center, might begin to emerge.

Loss is what happens to me every time I go through a doorway, across a threshold.  It happens every time I answer the telephone.  There is that moment, so fleeting at times that I rarely catch it, that moment like Coleridge’s “who’s that knocking at my door” moment, when there is the awesome possibility that my life will never be the same again.  That I will receive news, information -- that I will be formed inwardly in some radically unalterable and irreversible way.  When that occurs I will experience loss of my sense of self in that moment without feeling any simultaneous experience of gaining a self in all its newness and freshness -- the way one does when falling in love for instance.

Loss and gain are like two planets orbiting around a fixed sun of constant change.  What a powerful paradox that is.  The illusion is in our experience of loss and gain, of up and down, of in an out, of losing and winning, of rising and falling.  The deeper reality is that these are merely manifestations of my view of the world.  I conjure them up.  These are interpretations that I make in order to make sense of my world.  These interpretations are the source of my pain in the face of loss, and my pleasure in the face of gain.

What if I were to interchange the experiences?  What if I were to feel terrible loss every time I gained something, found something, met someone?  What would it be like to say How terrible, I just met the one person who will make my life complete… How could this happen to me?  If only I hadn’t walked into that room, picked up that phone.  What am I going to do now…?  Just putting those words on the page seems absurd.  But the loss that is encapsulated in gain is no less real for me, no matter how much I minimize it in such situations. 

This time it is different, I say.  This time it will be wonderful, perfect.  Like winning the lottery.  Wouldn’t that be great?  All gain no pain.  But must there be loss just as proportional to the gain?  Must there always be an evening, a kind of karmic balancing act? 

Maybe not.  Maybe it is all just a matter of change – that loss begets gain, and gain begets loss.  And whatever it is that I am experiencing in this moment is all there is, that loss is a door opening and gain is one closing.  This is the catastrophe – the constant overturning of joy and sorrow, of one turning into the other – of the human condition, of being alive.