On Life's Big Things

remembering what matters most

Certain experiences in life reveal to us what’s really essential. A newly diagnosed illness, death of a loved one, miscarriage. Grief in all of its orientations of past, present, and future losses put us face to face with the fragility of life. Sometimes, what life deals us shows us our happiness in hindsight, one we’d wished we’d occupied more fully when we had the chance. None of us are exempt from our own personal version of a time when life delivers The Big Thing that gives us a whole new idea of a previous day-to-day baseline. We might have unknowingly taken circumstances or people for granted, made assumptions based on illusions of certainty, or overlooked the richness of meaning in our lives. At best, we celebrated gratitude largely and often on the good (and good enough) days, and instead, the hindsight is more along the lines of at least we knew. In our full humanity, likely, it’s a blend of all of this and more.

These are the experiences of our lives of such magnitude that, whether gradually or in an instant, crack us open. With a deep fissure down the middle of life as we knew it, we experience a paradigm shift. In the gravity of Life’s Big Things, we’re brought onto new terrain, one where our lens of the world is different. These experiences are rude in nature, lacking conscientiousness in their timing, and certainly aren’t concerned with getting our consent, given their total disregard for our perceived readiness for interruption to life as we know it. There’s a forcefulness of these experiences in the way that they grab us by the shoulders and face us back toward what actually matters to us. The recognition can be so bright that it’s practically blinding, like an adjustment of our eyes to lights turned on too quickly, harsh in contrast to our dimly lit ignorance. Facing truth, without being able to shield ourselves from it, we become acutely clear on where we’ve placed too high value of importance, and what we’d forgotten until now. In this sense, maybe it’s not entirely new terrain that we find ourselves on, but a return to somewhere we’ve been before, a remembering of our feet on ground level. Life’s Big Things tend to be humbling.

We can ironically (maddeningly!) overlook the simplicity of the essential of what we need when things are going well. But when we’re transported to a brand new reality through an unexpected adversity, we’re also often transported, willingly or not, back to the elemental, to the real sources of sustenance in our lives. In a given moment of reckoning with Life’s Big Things, refuge could be solitude in nature, while for someone else, being held in the arms of another. It could be a hot home cooked meal or our favourite choice of takeout without having to lift a finger in the kitchen. Refuge might be a release in physical exertion with sweat dripping, chest heaving, or a dark room with blankets over head. Creative expression in a given moment at a given time, at another, a much needed nonresistance to pause, for blank stares at the wall, a mind offline.

We all need different things at different times, and especially so in the face of crisis or loss, of unwelcome change. But when we look closer, there is more commonality than not in what we’re reaching for in the midst of coping with Life’s Big Things. We share in the bare bones of what we need not just in order to bear life’s hardships, but for a life well-lived. We may seek it differently at different times, but fundamentally, we’re all after the same thing: connection. Solitude for the sake of being in company with ourselves, the embrace of a loved one, the comfort of meeting our most basic needs, self-expression, or starting with nothing else other than regulating our nervous system in stillness, are all, ultimately, pathways to connection. Even our ugliest and most destructive forms of self-soothing are, at their core, a reach for something to fill our need for non-aloneness.

Susan Johnson, one of the prominently known names in attachment science—that is, the science of our need for healthy relationship with ourselves and others—reminds us that the “universal life-and-death issues that elicit our deepest anxieties [are] concerns about death, the finiteness of life, and the inevitability of loss; concerns about how to make life meaningful although transitory; concerns about choice and how to take responsibility for constructing a life; and, concerns about isolation and aloneness.” She points to a central tenet of attachment therapy, which is that “a felt sense of secure connection with others is seen as our species’ main and most efficient way of effectively dealing with such existential vulnerabilities.”

We need connection as an antidote to our powerlessness over death and loss, and it’s in the universality, in the sharing of our deepest existential anxieties, and in the fact that none of us get an exemption card from Life’s Big Things that makes them at least a little more bearable. Folk duo, Mandolin Orange sing it more succinctly,

Loss has no end, it binds to our connection
We don’t speak of it, we don’t even try…

Our time here together being finite is a fundamental truth of our existence, and yet as the song lyrics point to, we collectively skirt around it. We all engage in a bit of collusion when it comes to avoidance of the uncomfortable truth of our mortality, don’t we? We might keep our own grief behind closed curtains or be too afraid to ask questions that risk a peak through someone else’s curtains, revealing theirs. Not to mention a global anti-aging industry comprised of billions of dollars, which if we look at it plainly, is the commodification of our resistance to any evidence of our mortality, of growing or looking older, a resistance to the only certainty of life. It’s costly to resist the inevitable. Our collusion in the avoidance of life’s only certainty can be subtle too, like in our day-to-day participation in upholding illusions of control that delude us into thinking that our personal plans trump life’s plans. It’s an ongoing lesson, a life’s work to see through our own versions of thinking that our thinking mind is the one that gets to have a grasp, a final say on how things go. It’s a life’s work to be humbled again and again, to have a willingness to remember life’s plans trump ours, and that it’s a rule of thumb, not an exception, that life’s plans include loss.

We all have our own personal ways of turning away from our powerlessness over loss. Our psyche does what it does to tolerate the truth of our mortality and for that, we need not only compassion, but an appreciation for the way that our mind takes care of itself to cope with the unspeakable. Our vulnerability—the thinness of the boundary between life and death, a still heart or a beating one—is not unique to us human beings; we are, after all, animals like all others that are born, live and breathe, and die. But we are unique from other creatures in that we have to live while fathoming such a truth, and in turn, somehow live with the existential concerns conjured by the very consciousness that makes us bizarrely human. And in having to live with that existential predicament, put bluntly in the words of humanistic psychologist, Erich Fromm, “[we] would indeed go mad if [we] did not find a frame of reference which permitted [us] to feel at home in the world in some form and to escape the experience of utter helplessness, disorientation, and uprootedness.”

We need to give ourselves some grace in knowing that such a frame of reference will be what it is for each of us, day-to-day, hour-to-hour, moment-to-moment. We’ll find ourselves in the avoidance, applying the anti-wrinkle creams, or finding ourselves pleased and deluded that a day went to plan because it was written in the calendar and at the control of our fingertips. But we can intersperse a different frame of reference amongst these ones. By remembering our mortality and life’s only guarantee of loss and change, we offer ourselves a frame of reference far greater in depth and endurance than those of the superficial, one that puts connection at the forefront of our days, and orients us toward a life of meaning.

More often than not, though, we’re forced back to the essential—back to connection—through unprecedented times, rather than as a daily practice and way of being when things are going well. This essay began, originally, as a free-write in my journal about a year ago when my partner, Taylor (who happens to be my very favourite person) became chronically ill with an autoimmune disease that had yet to be diagnosed at the time. While he became increasingly sick, seemingly disappearing before my eyes, nearly skeletal in appearance, he was both eerily the same person I’ve always known and at the same time, somewhat unrecognizable to me. I remember being struck by how quickly his physical form changed before my eyes, and both frightened and touched by the reality of the human body’s dynamic nature, of every single body’s impermanence, and most of all, his impermanence. In the months that he was sick, the changing nature of all things wasn’t just an idea and a practice, but was the air we breathed; a painfully honest, loving truth looking back at me. For weeks on end, still yet to respond to his treatments, his and our usual familiar life as we knew it was pulled out from underneath of us. Life became one day at a time, as it always is, but our sense of the truth of it was heightened. Any tendency toward avoidance or illusion of control quickly crumbled under the weight of Life’s Big Thing at the time.

Months later, when he was finally responding to his treatments and out of the woods of the worst of it, we were quipping about 2023 as “The Year of Cancelled Plans.” I asked him, What was your favourite part of being sick? Knowing my question, though asked playfully carried sincerity, he answered without pause, The simplicity. He went on to explain that what mattered became very simple, and while of course he wouldn’t want to live the entirety of his life in such a state, amidst the unpleasantness of it all, there was freedom in the perspective and clarity on what did and did not matter to him at the time. I related to what he was describing from my own health-related experience years earlier, in recovery from surgery as a liver donor for my older sister. What mattered at the time had become wonderfully simple: the love of my deepest relationships that sustained me and the most guilt-free prioritization of rest and recovery I’ve ever known. My body was regrowing a vital organ, down to a third of its intended size, back to full size. My body humbled me, relieved me of control I’d never had to begin with, and delivered my mind a rare experience of complete enoughness that wasn’t just a fleeting moment of surrender, but an experiential, bodily led knowing: This. Is. Enough. I still try to reach for the memory of that clarity, or for the wisdom of Taylor’s, when I find myself too lost in the minutiae or stressed about inconveniences that I’ve mistaken as problems.

Life’s Big Things put us back into contact with the essential of what we need, which is a sense of connection and non-aloneness. We need it to face the uncontrollability of our lives and to be able to face the inconceivable truth of our mortality and of those we love most. But what if we could remember the essential of what we need a little more often without having to wait for a crisis to show us?

You know that feeling when you think you’ve lost something important and then upon finding it, all of the sudden life’s a little more delightful, although the same? Such can be a practice of imagination at larger scale, or what the stoics gave to us as “negative visualization.” As a practice, we can bring to mind how it might feel to lose someone or something we care deeply about, not to invoke debilitating fear and anxiety, but to intentionally summon gratitude that keeps our hearts open to our most cherished people and sources of meaning in our lives.

We’re only human, so yes, we’ll revert to our autopilot modes, forgetting the big uncomfortable truth, and spend time in our dimmer frames of reference. But we can come back to the essential by remembering as a practice because indeed, practice is a verb, not a noun—an active engagement, rather than a place we arrive. In remembering our mortality and the essential of our lives that it brings us closer to, we operate in the world differently. We’re kinder, we reach out, we prioritize moments of quiet, we remember that everyone carries grief in one shape or another, we forgive more (or at least, orient our hearts toward it), we look and listen more closely, and we can’t help but to be in love with our days, even the impossibly hard ones.

With a frame of reference that brings us back to the essential of life, we save ourselves from something far more unbearable than the truth of our mortality: the regret that we hadn’t lived a more deeply connected and meaningful life if we’d stayed closer to the truth of our finitude along the way. By being reminded of the precariousness of it all, not in total fear but in reverence, we stay close to the divinity of a single moment, an hour, a day, a life. As she does, Mary Oliver sums it up for us, in her relevantly titled poem, “When Death Comes”:

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.