Change and loss

Contribution by Lemongrass Coach Wendy van de Kragt

Change and loss

The surname of change
is not infrequently also loss.
And losing, it seems,
the greatest natural disaster for our human psyche.

When it comes to losing,
there are actually two possible answers:
holding on or letting go.
To us humans the task
balancing on the thin rope
that goes between the two.

Letting go is different from leaving behind.
And retention is something else
then refuse to continue.

With the above poem by Henri Bergson, I open the last day of the Practitioner coach training I provide for Gort coaching. Life is full of beginnings, welcomes, endings, farewells and everything in between. And as a facilitator of change processes with people, you encounter this everywhere. It helps to regularly ask yourself the question "how do I actually do that myself, lose?".

Participants shared something about their feelings around the approaching goodbye. Holding on differently someone called it. Another saw this end not as an end but a new beginning, and yet another was moved to realise how this farewell synchronised with another farewell.

I realise that due to the traumatic circumstances of my father's death, goodbye and loss for me were long linked to being alone, and then of the lonely alone kind. I am grateful to have experienced that grief needs witnesses. And now that my mother has recently passed away, I share a lot with others and also grieve alone, but in a kind of connected-with-me-and-something-great alone.

What does this poem evoke in you and what change, as well as loss, is playing out in your life right now?

For more guidance; read the booklet Natriltijd by Riet Fiddelaers-Jaspers, share about it with loved ones, and be welcome for an appointment.

Wendy van de Kragt