Healing as Expansion: The Ability to Hold Both Gratitude and Grief
Lately I’ve been reminded that loss doesn’t always come in the form of death. Sometimes it’s the living, breathing absences—the people who still walk the earth but no longer walk beside us. The relationships that slip out of rhythm. The conversations that used to hum and now only echo.
These kinds of losses carry their own grief—a slow, ambient ache that doesn’t announce itself with finality. It lingers in unguarded moments: an old message thread, a familiar scent, the urge to share good news with someone whose seat is now vacant.
These experiences happen to everyone. To survive, you must learn to live inside that ache without making it an enemy. More profoundly, you must learn to process it, by applying internal clarity. You must learn what to hold onto—and what you can finally set down.
Ways I Find My Balance
Circles of Control
One of the essential frameworks I return to again and again is the Circles of Control. This simple, ancient idea is designed to maximize your energy and minimize wasted suffering. It teaches you how to triage your effort by recognizing what falls within your circle of control, and what lies beyond it.
I can control my own words, my choices, and my integrity. I cannot control the stories others tell about me. I cannot control their illnesses, their perceptions, or their reasons for walking away.
When I practice that level of discernment, I can finally set down the weight that was never mine to carry.
Shrinking the Frame
Another anchor I use frequently is the practice of shrinking the frame. When a day feels unbearable, I remind myself: just one hour at a time. If an hour feels too heavy, then I only need to get through the moment. One breath. One small, survivable piece of living.
It’s not about endurance for its own sake—it’s about learning to stay present without demanding that everything make sense in the moment.
The Clean Street Policy
And then there’s a phrase that has followed me through many seasons: keep my side of the street clean.
For me, living by this policy means acknowledging where I’ve fallen short and making amends when I can. It also recognizing that other people's actions, feelings, and consequences are not yours to manage. It's a kind of quiet dignity—a personal accountability policy that allows you to live freely, honestly, and to practice compassion, even when understanding or resolution isn’t mutual. By rigorously cleaning your side of the street, you enforce an internal boundary against emotional overreach.
None of these things are solutions. They don’t erase the grief or tidy its edges.
But they keep me steady when sorrow moves through like an undertow—pulling, insistent, but not invincible.
Grief as Evidence: Finding Expansion, Not Closure
There’s another truth I’ve come to trust: grief reshapes itself over time, but it never fully leaves. It transmutes, becoming something we carry differently. At first, it’s sharp and impossible to hold without flinching. Then, slowly, it softens into a kind of companion. It rides alongside us in the passenger seat, no longer steering, just quietly present.
And if we let it, grief can become an opening—a space where empathy grows. When you’ve been broken open by loss, the world changes texture. You start to recognize the hidden aches in other people. You stop assuming anyone’s fine just because they say they are. You learn how to sit with struggles and pain—yours and theirs—without needing to fix it.
This refusal to fix is crucial, both for ourselves and for others.
Why We Must Resist the "Fix-It" Urge
The urge to fix—our own or others’ pain—often stems from fear of discomfort and uncertainty. That fear gives rise to patterns that often backfire:
Avoidance: When we rush to fix, we're often trying to terminate the feeling (grief, anxiety, stress) because we don't want to feel it (or watch someone else suffer).
Rash Decisions: When we intervene during emotional moments, we don't allow for the necessary pause. This can lead to rash decisions based on panic, not clarity.
Diminished Agency: Offering unsolicited solutions—whether for ourselves or others—imply we can’t cope. That erodes agency and interrupts natural resilience.
Beyond Fixing: The Organic Process of Resilience
The deeper work lies in learning how to simply hold the space for the pain. By sitting with our own discomfort, we don't make rash decisions and we allow the slow, organic process of resilience to take over.
In time, the ache becomes less about what’s missing and more about what remains: the lessons, the tenderness, the way your heart can still soften despite everything it’s survived.
Maybe this is what healing really is, not closure, but expansion—
the ability to hold both gratitude and grief in the same breath.
