You are possibly at your busiest time of year: normally at this time the sun, light and heat-drenched days of our long summer are a mere somatic memory. This year we have a glorious and colourful season in spite of the lack of a traditional summer. The trees aesthetically ease our journey to winter with their myriad variations from green, to gold to brown and we either begin to look forward to or to dread our winter celebrations.
Autumn is a preparation for loss. The loss of leaves, of light, of heat or warmth. My autumn last year was filled with personal loss. I spent two days with a friend on a personal mini-retreat at the wonderful Parcevall Hall (1) where we lead retreats. Loss became a theme for us: loss of parents, loss of dreams and loss of old ideas about ourselves that no longer serve us well.
I also attended the funeral of a colleague's husband, one of those rare and special human beings who for ten years lived each day with the knowledge of his own mortality having both atypical TB and Crohn's disease. He had been a kind, gentle, clever and thoughtful man who had clearly brought joy and contemplation to many. He wrote an extraordinary book, Being Alive (2), a series of essays on dying and loss and managed against all the odds in his final months to give a paper on Assisted Dying to a conference. His writings are human, complex not shying away from the difficult, wide ranging and moving. His funeral celebrated a life of giving and thinking.
I have become even more aware at the moment of the tremendous existential loss we all face if we don't unite and take the kind of action recommended by George Monbiot in his thought-provoking, action-inducing book Heat (3) which maps out clearly, concisely and with scientific rigour that unless we all cut carbon emissions by 90% by 2030 that all of our children will face a massive loss of land and life. I have been shocked, as he predicts, that intelligent people I talk to are still in a sort of denial about this and the suggestion that they may no longer fly is greeted by humour and anger.
Many psychologists and thinkers talk of the sequential stages of a grief and loss cycle (4) Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross suggests denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance and others have shown this to be a rather simple take on a complex iterative process which also includes Shock and Numbness, Yearning and Searching, Disorganisation and Despair, and Reorganisation (5).
I work with many people at an age and stage in their lives beginning to wonder about the end and loss of job, career and in some cases, meaning. We all begin to reflect on our life’s purpose, the difference we make, the values we bring.
John Bowlby's groundbreaking work on Attachment, Loss and Grief (5) is beginning to be widely accepted as helpful to so many different aspects of our lives. Simply put, he identified that the patterns laid down by our need for security in attaching to our primary caregiver in the first two years of life sets up psychological and behavioural patterns which for many of us are totally out of awareness and yet are replayed on a daily basis.
So what of all this in our work? What are the things we grieve for? A project which didn't quite come to fruition in the way we envisaged, the end of a team-focussed approach, the end of a job, the retirement of a trusted colleague, the loss of a grant, the missed promotion or the redundancy.
The central psychological issue here is how we deal with loss. What is our pattern? Is it a cycle and are we aware of when we feel denial, anger and real sadness in the workplace? Are we aware of how the earliest patterns of yearning for mother or father to meet the needs we had before we had the language to ask for them to be met replay in our management teams and boards?
How can we be robust? Do we need to be? Is it a cultural expectation that we have to "Be Strong" and not show our emotions. The healthy ways include acknowledging individually, organisationally, corporately and collectively that loss is a theme, a vital part of life. Death and ending gives the ultimate narrative and induces sense-making. So often it is unspoken in the workplace. We give "compassionate leave" for a personal loss, the one time when the world of work acknowledges our personal space and lives which are ultimately for us all the really important biological, psychological and emotional centre of our lives and existence,. You could also interpret it as an organisational inability to deal close to with sadness, anger and grief.
We need to bring much more to awareness the role grief and loss play in our daily lives and to feel the feelings, our own, those of our colleagues friends and loved ones and those of the organisation and accept them without hiding them, denying them and pushing the feelings into our individual and corporate unconscious. Much has been written about the somatic effects of holding onto sadness and anger - we need to find appropriate, safe and comfortable ways to holding them and releasing them.
The American eco-psychotherpist and spiritual thinker Jeanne Mackey writes (6):
In the Autumn, we honour old ways of being and believing, and then let them go.
It is also a time of acknowledging the aspects of our life that we value the most.
The ancient Chinese bowed to one another as a gesture of honour and respect. The fall is the season when we simply bow to life exactly as it is. It may not be all that we wish it to be, yet we bow to what is.
If you have ever stepped outside after a heavy snowfall, you have experienced the quiet of winter. Winter is a time of deep listening to ourselves, to one another, to the silence. It's a time of not knowing, of living with possibilities. We are naturally called to "be" more than "do" It is easier to see the essence of things in this season. The trees are no longer shielded by their leaves, so we can see their fundamental structure. It may also be a time we can see our own true nature more clearly.
references
- Parcevall Hall , www.parcevallhallgardens.co.uk/
- Raymond Johnston, Being Alive www.celticcatpublishing.com/beingalive.htm
- George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, Allen Lane 2006ISBN: 0713999233
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On death and dying, Macmillan 1969
- John Bowlby, Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York
- John Bowlby, Attachment and loss: Vol. 2. Separation. New York
- John Bowlby, Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss: Sadness and depression. New York
- www.geocities.com/jmackey50/article.htm
