We Are Responsible For What We Do With Our Grief

The Buddha said that the quantity of tears each of us has cried over many lifetimes is greater than all the water in the four oceans. Even if you don’t believe in rebirth, this image makes sense. Everyone you meet is carrying an unfathomable amount of pain, so great, in fact, that no amount of expression could ever scratch its surface.

This is the paradox of grief: we need to express it, but we also need to understand that it is bottomless and inexpressible. We also need to focus on a way out.

Grief is like a camera that spotlights certain things but blacks out others. It’s easy to weaponize grief, to use it to promote revenge or the dehumanization of others. We zoom our cameras in on the flaws of our enemies or the innocence of our friends. We use biased metaphors and lopsided analogies. But to what end? As our cameras churn out one propaganda film after another, the tears just continue, and the way becomes even more confused.

We don’t need more history lessons. There are countless ways to tell the story of any conflict or tragedy, all of them based on including some things and excluding others. But if you add up all the perspectives with an open mind, you’re left only with the truth of interdependence, the truth that hurt people hurt people, the truth that unprocessed trauma begets trauma, the truth that you can trace blame back to the beginning of time and all you’re really seeing is your own face in the mirror.

We need to break this cycle. When we get stuck on the past, it becomes our present karma. We need to be more humble, more rigorous, more focused on the few options we really do have in the present. For grief can also spur us to ask important questions. What are we doing with our hearts right now? What are we doing with our speech? How can we repair our own corners of the world? That is our real legacy, our gift to this species.