The Season of Surreal Sadness

Get ready while you’re happy and strong,
Make preparations for when life turns wrong,
Life’s got a way of getting our attention,
We go from one realisation to another dimension.
Loss catapults us into an abyss of grief,
Where happiness and hope are stolen by a thief,
Nothing can compare with sadness of this scale,
Experience of emotion where our soul does wail.

***

Sorrow is a friend to the person who has come to know it, having travelled through that valley of the shadow of death into a new realisation for life.

Sorrow, of course, is nothing to be afraid of. Such surreal sadness, when it cannot be avoided, forces us to experience what we would much rather avoid.

Having come into a season that could not be resolved through our own resources, we came eventually to accept that which we could not change.

We found we couldn’t mount any semblance of sustainability for a fight. To resist was worse than useless. We were better to grin and bear the harrowing season than waste the precious little energy we did have.

Grace to be accessed is our key. We must be able to extract the sense for fear and allow God’s grace to ameliorate that fear.

Sadness is nothing to be feared. It is, however, a thing none of us want. We don’t want to feel alone, afraid, lost, or aggrieved. But if we can feel these things in the rawness of being authentically us, and we can survive, we grow resilience.

The season of surreal sadness will change us. We will journey through some horrors and we will be indelibly changed, rearranged, and estranged to our old life.

We are made better as we traverse through sadness, not worse.

We come to be more compassionate, kind, available, humble, and courageous.

Life’s greatest challenge, perhaps, is to become skilled within our character to absolve loss. When we can see a loss as an opportunity to learn about ourselves and to learn about life, then we are able to counter the fear of being overcome with sorrow.

The season of surreal sadness is an opportunity of a lifetime. If we can get through the trial, a moment at a time – because that’s the only way we can do it – then we have what we need. And everyone has such access. Everyone has the same privilege.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.