I am feeling loss today and with it a sense of compulsion to both fill the gap and distract from it. I'm feeling the loss of people I have loved in the past who are no longer in my world anymore. Because of how often I feel this particular collection of emotions I do get a bit intellectual about our experience of them. Luckily, I'm doing a better task nowadays of letting myself also feel them as they are.
A few days ago, I was cycling in the rain and feeling things similar to what I feel right now and started telling all the people I have ever told I loved, or wished that I had, that I loved them and really felt into it. It brought a strong combination of joy and pain, with tears from both.
I think our modern experience of loss is unique in some ways, contextually at least. Living in this particular period of relative developed Western nation prosperity, I have had relatively few people close to me die in my life. I can count 16 friends, family, and teachers. I have had to edit that number a few times as I sit with the thought and more spirits surface in my memory. At 39 years of age, that's a low number for some places and times for sure. It also does not involve the loss of parents and most of my grandparents amazingly. Nor does it involve the death of siblings, partners, or my own children. This is rare for humans I think.
Yet, there is more going on. I have known a lot of people in my life. I don't know how my number of relations stacks against most people currently but I feel it is likely an outlier historically. Having lived in many places and being of a social and communal sort, this number has ballooned. Living in housing cooperatives, I've had more than 50 housemates in 8 years. Being polyamorous and very relationship driven before beginning that journey, I've had a lot of romantic relationships. Going to large schools and universities, spending time in skill and interest-based communities in large cities, traveling and living in multiple countries while speaking multiple languages, and now doing professional community work in cities while having my own martial arts school the number of people I have gotten to know feels significant. Not unique in any way, but meaningful.
The majority of people I have had at least a 1 hour long conversation with are no longer in my life. The majority of people to whom I said 'I love you' are also not in my life. Because I and most of the people I have cared about have not stayed in one place, we all have come into and left each other's realities as if that is a very normal thing to do. Maybe it is. Maybe humans have always gathered in occasionally extremely large groups to complete great works and commune spiritually and then have parted ways to go off to seperate villages and wandering bands. Maybe those have been experienced as losses. I don't know.
I know that we are a particularly past and future oriented set of cultures, us agrarian derived industrially developed humans. Not all humans even today spend as much time and energy planning the future and recalling their personal past. I believe that's significant. At a time of so many people, so much movement and transience, we also spend so much time projecting fantasies into the future that we stand to lose so much so often. We live in so many virtual futures that will never exist and then when the people we saw in those futures leave our lives we are feeling not just the experiential loss of the present but the imagined loss of the 'could have been'. We repeat this exercise every time we bring people into our lives ad infinitum unless we grow cold and closed and no longer welcome or pessimistic and cynical and doubtful of people staying around at all.
I have a theory about the conservation of emotional states. I think that we use our ingenuity to free us from feelings we don't want to feel and end up finding ways to feel them anyway. We don't like the fear and anxiety of the natural world threatening us at her leisure, but now we feel fear and anxiety of our own creation just as much if not more often. We create cultures of fear more prevalent that lions in the bush. We treat every test and presentation and hard work shift with the anxiety of battle and childbirth. I think the feelings are conserved because it is in our nature to feel and we can't escape those feelings.
What if loss is like that. What if we have done so much to keep humans from dying and created so many ways to stay in contact because we don't want to feel the loss that's our birthright. But what if we can't escape it. What if we will invent and discover ways to feel loss to the same degree no matter what we do. The people we are closest to will still die, but we've done a lot to keep ourselves insulated from that. But where those fates now loom forebodingly on the horizon, though steadily and sometimes suddenly approaching, we are in the meantime met with a constant stream of would-be lesser losses. People we used to know. No matter how much we might come back into each other's lives, we know we probably won't. We know we are in different worlds going in different directions. We know we'll never share what we once did. Loss by a thousand cuts, but loss all the same.
Note: This is a short reflection to get out some thoughts more than a polished piece. I'll hopefully start to engage in this habit more than I have in the past.
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