On Grief

I believe one of the most underrated ingredients for a rational life, a life in accordance with reason, is giving oneself time to appropriately grieve and introspect after challenging chapters. When I was younger, I didn't realize how important this is. I would foolishly make haste, not taking the time to pause and reflect—and from the effect of grief—in my attempt to escape it, I would ironically run into fractally similar situations that were only sure to deliver more of it; neglecting my own well being and even letting problems that were mine effect others around me.

Over the years, I've learned we tend to move faster when we don't know where we're going. Poor impulse control is a sort of default human tendency. Worse—it can even feel gratifying, but it usually means we've neglected taking the time to truly think and reason about our position. This tends to create a sort of "rationale debt" that our future self must address.

Now a bit older, I think one of the best investments I've made in life is making the very deliberate choice to give myself extended time to introspect in general, taking the time to map out the territory, to examine the fundamentals of nature, of grief, before rushing onward. Though, I do think in some scenarios grieving can be a process that never ends.

An idea I like to entertain is that developing the awareness to know pain—that is to say—to rationally reflect, rather than search for immediate joy to mask one's discomfort, tends to help us further develop, both intellectually and emotionally. Whereas in stark contrast, it is a sort of naïveté which tends to drive us to do the opposite, to act from pure impulse and reflexivity.

And the true irony of immature, selfish decision-making is this: we might say we are doing something because it is in our best interest, but when we haven't gotten a handle on understanding the true fundamental nature of things, and haven't taken the time to make proper a cartography of our dilemma and position in the world, decision-making itself becomes a footgun. The rallying cry of "This is in my best interest!" can sometimes be a facade for hurling ourselves into new catastrophes simply because we lack intellectual clarity regarding what genuinely benefits us. Naivety asserts, "It's my right, my freedom to distract myself from past catastrophes by hurtling into new ones!".

But, like so many aspects of life, living well isn’t something anyone inherently knows how to do. And like the act of grieving, it is a skill we learn how to do. Our initial attempts may be uncontrolled or destructive. Yet, through failure, we can learn to redirect destructive forces towards non-destructive or even constructive outcomes.

Though, perhaps it can be said that catastrophe pervades everything. Is the essence of the universe not a kind of cosmic horror comedy? I'm not sure. Maybe it is a joke. But maybe not quite. In a very serious way, I believe that important things are at stake. And that the small details do matter. Because small details constitute much larger ones. And that we should worry about being wrong and prevent terrible outcomes. Or else, why not just walk backwards into the evolutionary tree and return to behaving like beasts?

Returning to the topic of grief, I find it to be a very nice paradox. Because, on the one hand, it is no doubt the symptom of an irreversible wound. However, in a Hegelian sense, I perceive grief as a problem that is precisely its own solution. If we are courageous enough to sit with uncomfortable thoughts rather than dismissing them, we might discover that the world reveals itself more clearly. And we may perceive the world with new eyes. In this vein, even if grief has brought us to the brink of madness and we believe all hope is lost, it is precisely this absence of hope which might stir within us an aspiration for something new or better.