It feels like it’s time to start a new stage of the journey – one that I mentioned in an earlier post that will take me outwards.

My sense is that this isn’t going to be easy, though I may be wrong. When I was grieving, I travelled a lot, spent time with people that I really valued, but I still felt like I occupied a different world. I’ve made stabs at breaking out of what has been referred to as ‘the waiting room’ but I don’t seem to have got out yet. Do I want to? I wrote before about the need for solitude and quiet, but I’m aware of a creeping sense of isolation and separation from the world outside. I don’t like this cut off-ness and find it painful at times, but it can also seem preferable to taking a risk with a world that seems to be functioning quite OK without me.

My life is no longer all about grief. When it was, I felt like I had to be in a place where I could tend to the wounds and the pain. When I made forays out, it was into a world that seemed strange and removed, It was as if I was watching if from behind a sheet of glass. More lately I’ve spent time with people that has been rich and nourishing, but always with one eye on the fact that it isn’t really my normality, it’s a place I visit now and again before heading back to my life.

I read in books about the need to re-enter life after grief, but I’m not really sure how to do it. It feels like I have been away for a long time. I’ve changed a lot, not least in the last few months, as I’ve tried to make sense of the person I’ve become and, in some strange loop, go back over old patterns of thinking and being, knocking them into shape in light of the new. But if I can’t live life as the old me, then what?

What I want to write about now is finding a new way of being in the world, a world that I view very differently these days. I realise that when it comes to this blog, I don’t know what ‘winning’ really means, or if even if that’s something we should be aiming for, whether it’s realistic. But I do know that we have remarkable capacity to respond to the difficulties and struggles we face, both personally and in our communities. I also know that expressions of sorrow, helplessness and anger are part of finding a way to the new.

What will it throw up if I go on this journey, trying to discover what it means to fall in love with life, and the world, again? Maybe not answers, but perhaps some ideas about ways of approaching the difficulties we face?