Lessons in Loss

This morning I was woken up at 5am by a 6.3 quake that seemed to almost shake me out of my bed for a good 5 or 10 seconds. It was a wonderful reminder of nature's autonomy; it also brought to mind the lessons that life here has instilled in me.

(This week I've thought a lot about the deceptions of various forms of writing - the subject I promised to pursue in my last post, but did not have the motivation to write about them here. Perhaps I thought that this is not the proper venue for stuff like that. Instead, here is a picture of a waterfall less than an hour's drive away from my house.)

My grandpa died this weekend and so I decided to shave my head. Odd, perhaps, but it feels nice to have no hair again. He was my last grandparent and I have fond memories of him - a man always willing to tell a story from his long life. He was 94 and had had a 60+ year marriage. Talk about a life with many stories.

This year has been a sort of lesson in loss for me. Various forms of loss - some as minor as selling my nice camera on Friday in order to save up for going back to America. Then there was saying goodbye to someone who had become my very closest friend in Japan, not to mention all the people I left just by coming here. Also, I practically lost my identity here in Japan in a culture that is, naturally, not fluent in my culture.

But in loss there can exist the recognition that to lose you must have something to begin with. The chances are, if you have lost a good deal, then you probably still have even more to be thankful for. If you mourn the death of someone close to you, then you are fortunate (despite the pain) to still have life and to be able to care, to love, and to remember.

If you are lucky enough to have a lot of good people and things in your life then you will also have to face losing those people and things. But perhaps you could say that one is fortunate to be able to lose because it suggests that that person has also been lucky enough to have.