May 4
With everything that delights you, tell yourself what it is. A jug you love? If it breaks, you will not be shaken. If you kiss your child, your brother — tell yourself: you are kissing a human being. If he dies, you will not break.
Enchiridion, 3
Listening mode
With everything that delights you, tell yourself what it is. A jug you love? If it breaks, you will not be shaken. If you kiss your child, your brother — tell yourself: you are kissing a human being. If he dies, you will not break.
Some losses announce themselves long in advance. You have time to prepare, you say it out loud, perhaps you even play it through. Then, when it happens, nothing actually starts to slide. The ground holds. It hurts anyway, in a way the knowing never reached.
A distinction may help here. You are shaken where something breaks without your noticing: the quiet assumption that something would stay. That assumption you can examine and set down, and that is a real relief. Grief, by contrast, rests on no mistake. It is for what was, not for what you wrongly expected.
If you confuse the two, preparing can become a quiet withdrawal. You are already stepping back now so as to lose less later, and in doing so you lose some of the time that is still there.
Sometimes someone says of something they still have, for now: “I’m going to miss this.” That doesn’t sound like distance, more like someone looking more closely.
