We can become lost in our lives. How does it happen? Lostness has two speeds: slow and sudden. The slow barely perceptible speed of nature. Aging is a bit like this one. Slowly the face, hair, eyes, body are not your own. The other speed is sudden, and in a moment life as you knew it is nowhere to found.
The loss of the familiar can and does change the very landscape of our lives. The familiar crumbles. The familiar deteriorates, and quietly your life demands you wonder in the lostness of what your life was.
The false position of “certainty of life” is part of this change. Neither you nor I fully control our lives, have any guarantees of peace and happiness, or live without hardships. The past year has invited, commanded, even demanded we know this individually and on a wider scale.
The past year required that we release how we gather for church, how we honor those who have passed away, how we see our doctors and each other.
The past year has required wide sweeping changes in family life.
The past year has left many people lonely, scared, and isolated. For others, the past year turned the home into school or office, demanded church be changed, and even prevented rituals around welcoming new lives into the world and releasing loved ones into eternity.
What about you? Might you consider what has changed in the past year. Maybe your health, your church community, or your family. Maybe the view out your favorite window. Maybe your hope has evaporated, your faith in a better relationship, or a relationship fades, or maybe your body is aging and changing to the point it too is unfamiliar.
We are faced with losses that cannot be fixed.[1] Life is a bit easier for those to whom ambiguity is a friend and trusted companion. Coming to a place of being with ambiguity allows the confusion to settle. Learning to cope is best done with another person. And once again, here, sitting with ambiguity, is the work of being with one another. We are not built to do this work alone. A Spiritual Director, a trusted friend, a beloved family member – may be part of your journey in the lostness of your life.
[1] Paulin Boss, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 20.