OPEN QUESTIONs is a series about self-inquiry. It's about getting curious and staying curious. It’s about not just me but you also asking questions and letting them stay open for a while—like a window, like a door. So that new and insightful ideas filter in. You may certainly use these questions as journal prompts but I think they are just as useful as daydream fodder. Hold them in the palm of your mind and wonder for a while. Maybe wander, too. Walking pairs so well with self-inquiry. And because this (gestures to the imaginary ballroom around us) is meant to be a place of shared experience, I'd love for you to share feedback and reactions in the comments, too. If you'd like to read more iterations of OPEN QUESTION(s), just navigate to GRIEVER’s BALL and look for previous posts with that heading.
It’s not easy being among those left behind.
Those still standing.
Those who survive.
And yet the alternatives aren’t great, either.
I’m thinking here of what Tobias expressed in last week’s Griever’s Dossier about how his wife Cara was “the one worthy of going on.”
I’m thinking here of what happened last week on my way to work: A young woman attempted to carjack me and then followed me to my office, eventually assaulting me and a coworker. We’re okay—but/and, how is she? Nervous, scattered, and possibly drug sick, manic, or something similar and possibly combined, she didn’t seem qualified for what she was attempting to pull off. Her anxiety and desperation were palpable. When I related the event to one of my best friends she said, “Sounds extremely traumatizing for everyone involved.” My thoughts precisely—but, I went home that night it was to a warm, comfortable house. Where did she go?
And, of course, when we think about still standing, surviving, and existing in the face of global unrest, climate collapse, and genocide, we’re probably all thinking about how it feels to watch ordinary people—women, children, grandfathers, teachers, neighbors—in Ukraine, in Israel, in Palestine, on the south side of any and every American city. Under the oppressive thumb of politics, under the constant threat of gunfire, under waves of terror that just keep coming and coming and coming.
Often this state of mind is called survivor’s guilt, but—even though I’m still working out exactly why it feels important to make the distinction—I think there’s something else we experience feel. Something similar but different, which I’ll call survivor’s grief.
If you google “survivor’s grief,” you’ll just get results for “survivor’s guilt.” But grief and guilt aren’t the same thing. Again, I’m not sure I understand yet why that seems to matter, but if you indulge me in this iteration of self-inquiry, maybe we’ll find out something useful about what we’re feeling (no matter what it’s called, though I do think naming often matters), and what we can do about those feelings—and maybe more importantly: what we can do with those feelings.
Here’s what I’m thinking about:
If grief is a thing asking us to look very closely at what we want (albeit by shining a very harsh light in the direction of the thing we want yet, cruelly, do not and perhaps cannot have), is it possible that we can use that sight line to identify and build a relationship with longing and desire?
Can we use that sight line to identify and build a relationship with the kind of longing and desire that helps us attune to what Jungians and mystics call the animus—an inner motivating factor that drives us toward contentment, satisfaction, and realization?
And is it possible that tuning into that animus can help us surface not just a self-servicing satisfaction, but also a deep sense of non-duality, of inner-connectedness, of purpose, of meaning for community and all people?
What are you noticing so far about the difference between guilt and grief? Would you be able to do this exercise if beginning from a place of guilt? Goes guilt allow you to contact your animus and inner knowing? Does guilt have faculty, or agency? Can it be utilized, tapped, harnessed?
Can it be misidentified—can it be re-identified? Recategorized? What would happen if you tried, now?
Thinking now about categorizing your feelings and understanding what different feelings-states prompt or lead you to, make a side-by-side comparison of Grief and Guilt. Which can be, sometimes in someways, generative, and which seems to end in a stalemate, inertia? Perhaps there are no absolutes, no black and white. Record the nuances as they come up, continue thinking them through.
Reflect on a time in your life when you felt unsettled, anxious, perhaps depressed, and you did not know what you wanted. You knew you wanted something, but you could not identify what it was that would help, that would feel good, that would begin to pull you forward into light and forward motion. Now reflect on a time when you felt perhaps unsettled and unsure, but you knew what you wanted. You could set your gaze somewhere specific, and attune your focus and actions accordingly. What do you remember about the utility of that knowing? How did the ability to identify your desire aid you in your overall process? Perhaps you needed to edit or adjust your desire, but did the feeling of knowing what was wanted serve a purpose? Was it a fuel? If those two experiences were teachers, what were their lessons? What did they want you to know?
Begin now to compile a list of what you’re wanting in this moment. Decide the list won’t be done for a few days; keep it open, adding to it whenever new realizations appear. Let anything and everything come to mind and belong here. “World peace” belongs here. So does "a nap,” so does anything similarly gentle and small OR giant and seemingly, at this stage of the game, science fictional. So do arcane and specific ideas that only you understand. Everything belongs. Compile, compile, compile.
And then eventually: What themes emerge when you look over your list? What deeper desires underpin the more quotidian ones? Where can you identify your altruistic self? Where can you identify your vision for what you want the world to be?
In practical ways, maybe this is a vision of all people having access to clean water. Or maybe it’s about food and an end to hunger. Maybe your desires for your own home help you identify how deeply you believe in shelter as a basic right for all people.
Use this exercise—use your survivor’s grief—as a diving rod. Let it tell you what you believe in.
Do not give in to overwhelm. You will not be able to shelter every woman and child, but can you bring blankets to your local tiny home village? You alone cannot create cease fire in Gaza. But you, alone, can call elected officials. You can join efforts to support peacekeepers. You can have a neighbor over for dinner; you can connect and share and bridge and love. Start with anything. Do anything good that you can, and then build on that.
Write down the Quaker maxim, “Let your life speak.”
Listen.
beautiful prompting. thank you.
i’ve struggled with feeling my feelings about the difficult things in our world, i think because i haven’t been taught how to process collective grief. i assume i am not alone in this.
maybe there’s a warm inner place we can all reach into... and inside we could hold others, and allow ourselves to be held