Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

Ask yourself about the kind of life you want: What would you do day to day, and with whom, and where? Consider the life you have. Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two.

When life held your hand in the flames, it taught you something about the kind of burning you can endure. You survived: don’t forget that, and don’t diminish it. KEEP MOVING.

Mourning a living person is different from mourning the dead. A woman whose husband dies is a widow. But there is no word for a person who grieves a living person—a child, a partner, an estranged family member or dear friend. There is no name for what you are when a part of your life and identity dies, but you go on living. There is no name for what you are when you outlive the life you expected to have and find yourself in a kind of afterlife.

Accept that you are a work in progress, both a revision and a draft: you are better and more complete than earlier versions of yourself, but you also have work to do. Be open to change. Allow yourself to be revised.

It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are.

Don't wait for your life to magically come together--it's your work to do. Every day, every moment, you are making your life from scratch. Today, take one step, however small, toward creating a life you can be proud of.

Stop searching yourself trying to understand why someone else treated you the way they did. The answer is not inside you; it's inside them, out of reach.

Close the gap between yourself and your spirit--the person you know you can be. Let your choices reflect the person you want to become, not just the person you think you are.

Stop calling your heart broken; your heart works just fine. If you are feeling--love, anger, gratitude, grief--it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it.

Start making yourself at home in your life as it is.

A silver lining of being alone is being with someone you can trust, someone you respect and understand. You can let your guard down when you're by yourself. You can give yourself permission to live your authentic life, without apology. You can love yourself in a way that no one else can.

Recognize the difference between The End and An End.

Fight the urge to withdraw, to fold in on yourself, as if your pain is contagious and might infect someone else. We are here to take care of one another; the care is what's catching, spreading person to person to person. So take--and give--care.

What is embarrassment but a relative of fear? You've been seen—caught—at being imperfect.

Give the present the gift of your full attention.

Do not be ashamed of the intensity of your emotion. That's your humanity. Grief can be feral, wild, frightening. Give it a safe place to live.

Do not be led by fear; fear cannot lead you out of the dark. Find whatever bits of hope you can--a trail of even the smallest bread crumbs, even the tiniest pebbles reflecting the moonlight--and follow them.

You don’t have to be in love to have love in your life. Take stock of everything—and everyone—that fills your heart.

Your work is being yourself, offering what you can to others. You’ve been doing it all along. Now do it with intention.

If you’re not careful, you can revise the life right out of a piece of writing. If you’re not careful, you can scrub all the weirdness and wildness right out of it. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you can polish it dull.

Accept that you may never get to know what it means. Accept that there may not be a reason, despite the comfort that reasons provide. Don't look for meaning in whatever collapsed around you; make meaning by digging yourself out.

Stop focusing on what is behind you. It's growing smaller and smaller, miniaturizing in the distance; stop squinting at it, as if it has answers. Today, keep your eyes on where you are going, not where you have been.

Think of what you’ve achieved that didn’t seem possible last year, or five years ago, or ten; it didn’t seem possible then but you’ve proven that it was. Now imagine what might be possible in another year or five or ten. KEEP MOVING. Ask yourself what you would do if you had an unlimited supply of both courage and hope. Now begin answering that question with action. Take one step today—then repeat, repeat, repeat.

Commit yourself to the present. Loosen your grip on the life you had before—before a loss, an upheaval, a change that called everything into question—so that you can be here, where you’re needed, right now. KEEP MOVING. Do something today that will bring you joy even if you know you will not do it well.

Let the hard days be hard. When you mourn a person, it’s a form of love. You mourn their loss because they mattered, because the world without them is diminished. Sit still with your grief if you need to, then lift it and carry it with you. KEEP MOVING. Take stock of what you can see in your life now that parts of it are gone: What view has that space created?

Remember a time when you forgave someone, how freeing that felt. You deserve your mercy as much as anyone else does. Forgive yourself for something today, something you wish you’d done differently. Just let it go. Free yourself from it.

have no idea what the next twenty years of my life will look like, only that they won’t—can’t—look like the last twenty years. That forest has burned. And yet. And yet!

Being strong, bracing yourself against hurt, can get in the way of actual healing; the real work.