The losses keep coming. The lives lost in the DCA plane crash, entire communities lost in the LA fires, careers lost from new policy shifts. Words feel hollow in moments like this because they are.
But there’s something we’ve forgotten about loss, and how it affects us.
It’s not the actual stuff- houses can be rebuilt, so can businesses, schools, and communities. People can find new jobs, begin new chapters. It’s what can’t be replaced that hurts. The invisible things. The people, the memories, the relationships with our neighbors and colleagues. The certainty of tomorrow looking like yesterday’s news.
What makes it sting even more is that Mother Nature made us this way.
It’s not really the change in circumstance that gets us, it’s the loss of certainty that comes with it. When the landscape changes, the map we use to navigate the world is suddenly out of date. So until we get a new map, we feel lost. Vulnerable. But it’s that feeling of discomfort that kept our ancestors alive for millions of years. It’s not a bug in the system. It is the system.
The business world has it wrong. Change is NOT the only constant- loss is. Loss is upstream from change. Loss is the central motif of the human condition.
To gain anything at all, loss is involved. Our greatest stories and myths are all about that. Christ lost his life. Buddha his princely title. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal- his friend, Falstaff. Even Luke Skywalker lost his entire world to save the Galaxy.
And King Lear discovered what we all lose eventually- everything. Our actual lives.
“He who learns must suffer,” Aeschylus wrote. “And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
What we can easily forget is that loss isn’t something that happens to us. Loss is what makes and remakes us. Drop by drop, against our will, wisdom comes.
Sic transit gloria mundi – thus passes the glory of the world. But we pass through it together. To those in the storm right now: you don’t walk alone.
