Life lessons

Loss. Man—it hangs out in the strangest, most unexpected corners to jump out at you with a shiv.

This was brought home to me yesterday, in the class we’ve been running at work; you know—the one meant to spark new business ideas. We’re at the point where it’s time to distil all the crack-brained concepts down to one that you feel will not disgrace you dreadfully if you pitch it to the greater world next month.

Over the next couple of weeks, the instructor told us, we should try various methods of running our ideas through reality checks. And one of them was to present a matrix of them to “two or three of your closest friends” and ask them which of these do they definitely see me doing or not doing.

The thing is—the person I’d automatically run something like this (or everything in general, tbh) past, in a laughter-infused conversation, is dead. She’ll never sort through my wild-assed ideas and tell me which would suit me and which I should douse with petrol and light up in the back yard. I’ll never get to have a conversation of any type with her, and that realization struck me yesterday like an icy fist to the chest, 21 months after she died. I nearly left the classroom, before I got my shit back together.

And because it’s so unexpected—because you were muddling along with your life without any massive tsunami of grief—it’s like being mugged in the lobby of a five-star hotel. It just comes at you wherever it finds you, and you simply have to let it wash over and ride it home.

So that’s all I got today.