We seem to spend a lot of time grieving. We grieve when we discover that our parents aren't perfect. We grieve over our lost loves. We grieve over dead or dying marriages. We grieve over having distanced ourselves or over having been distanced from/by friends or relatives (either geographically or emotionally or both.) We grieve over the deaths of those we have cherished.

It is all the same process. I think it all has roots in one single thing: we feel cheated. After all, we had been happy with the way things were. It was our (conscious or unconscious) expectation in most cases that there was some manner of security; that those things would perpetuate for as long as we could imagine. We feel cheated that our happiness was taken from us.

We react to these inequitable situations with sorrow and even with anger. This continues until we find some way to accept the unfairness of life. Often this can take quite a long time. After all, things that are unfair, by definition, go against all reasonable expectations. Thus, a tremendous shift in reasoning needs to take place in order for us to accept these aberrations. Since each of us has his own means of reasoning, it is nearly impossible to prescribe a particular method by which an individual might go about rearranging his most fundamental thoughts.

This brings me to why I see great wisdom in Mick's suggestion that you "find your version of the hill, take your version of the Low D whistle…" What it comes down to is that each of us needs to discover the means by which we can meditate over this paradigm shift in our lives. Once we have found those means…well…it's just going to take a while.