When Crisis Has Changed Your Life

by James E. Miller

Sometimes life hurts us.
Sometimes it robs us of something, or someone, very dear.
Sometimes it causes us pain,
     a pain we did not choose and do not want.
Sometimes life severely restricts us.
When that happens, we feel out of control.
We may be tempted even to question the meaning of our lives,
     asking, “Why me?”, “Why mine?”, “Why this?”, “Why now?”.
A future we had taken for granted will not come to be.
Plans, carefully drawn up, will not lead where we expected.
We find ourselves face-to-face with life circumstances
     not of our liking.
A life, in short, we don't quite know how to live.
We wonder: how do we go on?
Where is the meaning?
And how do we re-design our lives when the future that is
     before us is so different from the one we've foreseen?
What must happen first is quite clear, quite natural—
     and perhaps quite overwhelming.
We will do well to let out our feelings.
And we will have many of them.
There may be anger, even outrage.
There may be fear, even terror.
There may be sadness or despair.
There may be feelings of guilt.
Our feelings matter, whatever they are.
And however we feel, it will help to give our feelings words,
     either spoken or written,
          either full-throated or whispered.
And we may need to do this, not once, but many times,
     as our feelings ebb and flow over the course of days, weeks, months.
We may surprise ourselves with the strength of our feelings,
     but that is okay, and even good.
For the presence of strong feelings today is a good prediction that
     we'll have strong ones tomorrow as well.
Tomorrow, when we'll feel something different,
     and more encouraging.
So this is our first fragile step: to release our feelings,
     so that eventually they will release us.

This writing is an excerpt is from the Willowgreen videotape How Do I Go On? Re-designing Your Future After Crisis Has Changed Your Life by James E. Miller. You can learn more about this resource, as well as other Willowgreen resources about loss and grief, here.

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