The Luminist

Prior to starting The Luminist, I spent a ton of time trying to figure out what the hell I was actually going to say in it. 

During this planning phase, I channeled my corporate wonk skills and developed a snappy elevator pitch to convey my intent: Shining a light on grief, death, and loss in order to console better, suffer less, and lead more vibrant lives. 

But it’s been almost a year since posting my intent online and writing about it every week. So I’m looking backward, assessing how this tagline jibes with what we’ve actually tackled.

Grief, death and loss? Check! These themes are woven through our posts. But maybe not in the way I originally envisioned. They are the dock from which every boat — or post — is launched. My intimate relationship with grief adds a unique spin to the ideas we explore here, even when the topics — making time for rest; balancing the journey with the destination; embracing failing; managing risk —  have (seemingly) nothing to do with them. ‘Suffer less’ and ‘lead more vibrant lives’ are also constant TL takeaways, since we are unapologetically self-help.

Consolation, however, has slipped through the cracks since post #4! I’m a little disappointed in myself… But maybe I’m not talking about consolation here so much because it’s already a big part of my daily life.

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As a 55-year-old with a cluster of friends a decade plus-or-minus, I’m smack dab in the ‘aging parents’ demographic. I’m also unfortunately in the ‘unpredictable bad things that befall people and end their lives’ demographic too. As a veteran of loss, I am often first to the grief scene, offering a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on. I consider it one of my sacred duties since I was initiated into widowhood.

But now, three weeks away from TL’s one-year anniversary, consolation feels important to weave back into this corner of the internet.

Because consolation can make a big difference in someone’s life… And we have so much to learn about giving support during one of the most common experiences in life.

I like ‘consolation’ because it is an action-oriented word. 

We can have sympathy for someone inside our own hearts and heads. But we can’t say we’ve consoled until we’ve taken action in the external world.

However, taking the tangible step from feeling sympathy to giving consolation can be hard, because… well, we’re afraid. 

When death is in the picture, fear can’t help but occupy a big part of our mental real estate. Our actions then get hijacked by our emotions, which can override even our best intentions. We end up feeling like we need to protect ourselves… which usually means avoiding rather than consoling.

I didn’t always believe people had good intentions — that people wanted to console. In fact, I would tell my BFF Julie stories about acquaintances who would avoid me or not talk to me about Mike’s death. 

“Anyone who can’t engage with me on this is a coward!” I would rail. “Why are they prioritizing their own comfort over my suffering?”

Ever wise and accustomed to my scorched-earth tactics, she would bring me back to the green surface of the planet. 

“People are just afraid. Afraid of dying. Afraid of saying the wrong thing. Or just maybe afraid of what you make them feel,” Julie counseled. 

Fear makes us tell stories to our brain that are patently false. Our fear runs a movie on the inside of our skull featuring two characters — us (aka the consoler) and the griever. Three frames in, we’ve made the griever cry. On the fourth, we’re crying too. Roll the end credits and blooper reel! High tail it out of the movie theater!

When our emotions lead the way, justifications for non-action bubble up in the place where consolation should be. We don’t help anyone and we end up making our world smaller — ever narrowed by the things we avoid in order to not feel what it’s perfectly human to feel.

There are many strategies for pushing through fear to do something anyway.

But as the newly minted president of the Feel Your Feelings Society, I cannot condone such action. (Except obviously in emergencies — I’m emotional, not foolish.) Besides, it doesn’t make us very good consolers. Consoling is all about offering comfort amidst emotion, not trying to wipe emotion off the face of the map. Practicing on our own feelings seems like a good place to start. 

So if we commit to not simply running away from the source of our fear… what then is our fear asking of us?

According to , beloved TL editor and author of , “Our bodies, our emotions, our stress responses don’t need solutions. They need to be heard. Once the message has been received — the mind has honored what the body is feeling; the body trusts it is being taken care of — the mind can do what it does best. Handle s**t.”

I want to say that again. Our emotions just need to be heard. They need to know their message was received. They don’t need to be shut down, ignored, or berated.

Leona coaches us in her post that, when fight or flight is not an appropriate response, we can simply let fear wash through us without reacting to it. Because we aren’t in physical danger, we don’t have to do anything with the feeling. Just acknowledging that the emotion has been seen and heard is enough. And remembering that everything is going to be alright.

When I close my eyes and imagine going through this process, I feel comforted. Nothing has actually changed but I feel more at peace.

And this is exactly what the grievers of the world need from us too. We can’t change their pain but we can acknowledge it exists. And show them we’re not going to shut it down, ignore it, berate it, or run away from it.

Our smart brains are sometimes dumb in the face of others’ grief.

We overthink things or try to apply inappropriate strategies or just assume that grievers are aliens because we can’t empathize with their situation and therefore don’t know how to act around them. 

In case you haven’t been initiated by the fires of grief, here are some other rules-of-thumb for consoling effectively:

> Channel Mr. Fix-It appropriately.

We like to fix things. That’s what we were trained to do in school and are paid to do at work. It’s our gear. But there is no fixing death and there is no fixing grief.

So once you are out of your head (having felt your feels), take some time to just sit with and listen to the griever. Grief is incredibly isolating, so while you may feel like you’re not doing anything, just being present is a huge comfort. 

And then, if you’re feeling like you absolutely have to do something tangible otherwise you’re going to jump out of your skin, start to pay attention to the needs the griever is expressing. Because while you can’t fix their inner state (and please don’t try, don’t point out a silver lining or say “buck up!”, it’s too soon, it’s always too soon), I’m sure there’s something helpful you can do in the external world, like:

* Starting a dinner donation chain

* Taking her car to the shop

* Picking up a kid from practice

* Helping with Christmas shopping

People did all of these for me, and it was a tremendous help. Tactically and emotionally.

Just remember, you’re not fixing the emotion. Rather, you’re listening compassionately, and then, after you’ve hugged the griever goodbye, you’re getting to work to “fix” a need they have.

> Maintain their meaning.

Loss takes a piece of our identity away. So grievers often cling to the part of ourselves that still exists — whether it’s work, book club, a sports team, or our drum circle. 

But when we return to work, for example, and people treat us differently, the solace we thought we’d receive just by existing as our work selves evaporates. Another leg of our identity stool, kicked out from underneath us.  

When I began a new job five months after Mike died, I had a peer who just didn’t know what to do with the fact that I was a widow. At one point he told the head of HR, “Well, I don’t want to go toe-to-toe with her in a meeting when I disagree with her. I mean, she’s a widow.”

Reader, I am one tough nut, but upon hearing that story from HR I slunk down the hall to my office, shut the door, and had a good cry. All I wanted was to be myself and contribute, not to be defined by my loss. This guy was pulling punches because of a weakness he perceived in me. But work was the one place I felt strong. 

Doesn’t matter the activity, it just matters that the griever has one place in their life that doesn’t feel utterly demolished by their loss.

I’m not saying, “act like nothing happened.” That would be callous at worst and inauthentic at best. But a simple, “I’m with you,” goes a long way. Then get back to drumming, book-discussing, foul-shot-practicing, or texting snarky comments via your under-the-table iPhone in tedious meetings. That’s the kind of normalcy grievers need. 

> Employ a classic consolation strategy.

Option 1: Tell a Story

Option 2: Ask a Question

Option 3: Be a Witness

It’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s about what you have to offer the griever. In this case, it’s all about you.

Did you know the person they lost? Tell a story. Like the myriad consolation letters I received from Mike’s colleagues with funny work stories or profound instances of his mentoring, each story brought me a new way of understanding my husband, even though he was gone.

Do you have a chance to be with the griever one-on-one? Ask a question. There are few more consoling questions than, “What was she like?” or “Tell me your favorite thing about him.” I’ll talk your ear off about Mike every time I am given the chance. And when I tell you about him, you’ll understand just a little more about me.

Do you want to support but don’t know how? Be a witness. Attend the funeral. Send a card. Shoot them a text letting them know they can always reach out, but they don’t have to respond. Gently remind them that they are not alone.

(My original consolation post goes into greater detail on these strategies.)

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When I began my new job six years ago, I met my great friend Mike. 

(Since my Mike died, new Mikes show up in my life whenever I need them!)

Our work duties intersect so we’ve spent countless hours together. He’s been with me when other people ask, “What does your husband do?” And when I tell them, they flee… but Mike stays. He’s been with me during hard and teary-eyed moments when grief momentarily overcomes me. He offers me tissues. He’s listened to a thousand stories about Mike. He asks questions. 

Mike shows us how simple it can be to console:

Over the days and months and years, just be there. Don’t let your fear trick you into running away. It’s grief, not a grizzly bear. 

Learn to sit with your own fear, to let it speak its worries to you, and then rest its head on your shoulder. Before you know it, you’ll be able to do the same for others. 

You don't have to show up with grand gestures, you just have to show up reliably. That is solace enough. 

To all the consolers who saved my life,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #4: Console better. ​The profound power of bearing witness, sharing stories, and asking questions.

* #5: Demystifying the griever’s mind. How stepping into the grieving mind allows us to be with others in the midst of their human experience… and our own.

* #13: We are not islands. Releasing the myths of isolation and avoidance.

* #14: Things will be great again. Giving each other permission to believe in the future while honoring the pain of the present.

* #19: Where words can’t take us. Ritual and the human need to relate.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

For most of my life, surrender was decidedly not my gear. 

In fact, it was something to assiduously avoid. From my perspective, surrender was for weaklings… those who wanted to get run over. I preferred control, determination, action, effort. (Sounds like a Ford F-150 commercial.)

This looked like planning and doing. Pushing back against systems that might have judged me incompetent or incapable. (Case in point — I have been a female in the male-dominated defense contracting world for 30 years.) General badassery. This is what got me to what I wanted, not surrendering.

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Decades ago in church youth group, we used to say “let go and let God.” Even though I was very devout and wanted to do this, I pushed back against it in my mind. Because I also wanted to control my own destiny and plow the path myself. Wasn’t God too busy for this small stuff? Wouldn’t I essentially be doing Him a favor by just handling it on my own?

I didn’t consider myself a control freak, I just associated control with the determination to get things done. They went hand in hand. Meanwhile, surrender was the antithesis. Surrender might work for other people but it was not for me. 

My husband’s unexpected death taught me what I’d been scratching my head over for 48 years in one split second. I could not control, determine, effort, or action my way through grief. That would be like trying to do a chin-up when both your arms are broken. 

But while that day forced me into surrender, it’s taken me years to find the words to explain why it feels so good.

“Aikido embodies the idea that when we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power.” 

I stumbled upon this surrender revelation in a book seemingly about creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship — The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis.

Though I discovered Lewis on Brené Brown’s podcast three years ago, I only just got around to reading her book this summer. You can actually see it tucked in my tote bag for the Italy trip in post #38! (Fun Sue fact: I order more books than I can possibly read, keep about five of them in rotation at any time, and fret endlessly before a trip on which three are going to fit in my backpack and not break my back. I hate leaving my books at home. I miss them. Yes, I am aware they did invent something called a KINDLE. I just can’t bear to leave my paper copies behind. And my tri-colored sticky notes. And my rainbow of pens.)

When I finally cracked the spine of The Rise, I didn’t expect to learn about surrender. I expected to learn about creativity and innovation and entrepreneurship. Turns out they are intertwined. Lewis explains how the experience of falling and beginning again envelopes the creative process. The first step, eloquently stated by the Aikido example above, is to stop fighting life’s circumstances — “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” and all that. But the second step is where things get really interesting: 

“It is a bit like living out Hooke’s law — the force of an extended spring is equivalent to how far it’s stretched. To convert our own energy and operate at full force, often we must first surrender,” Lewis explains. 

In other words, surrender is a source of potential, even power in the creative process — aka, all of life. 

Power and energy are not dissipated through surrender. They are consolidated. Then — BOOM — rapid expansion can occur.

I’ve written before about how acceptance is just the beginning: 

“Acceptance is not an abandonment of the good fight to live your very best life. It is actually opening yourself to it — especially when ‘your very best life’ no longer looks the way you had expected it to.”

In Brown’s podcast, Lewis similarly summarizes surrender as, “give over, don’t give up.”

When Mike died, I was faced with an unimaginable situation. So I had to do what I never imagined I would do. I put myself in the hands of all those who cared about me. I put myself on the paths of Great Falls. I gave myself to the pages of my books. I gave myself to the people at work. My world got both bigger and richer as I was forced to work outside of the boxes I had created for myself.

But I don’t want this to turn into another self-help blog championing the fluffy benefits of surrender without taking a hard look at what it actually takes.

Because it does require giving up on some dreams and expectations… and allowing something new to bloom in their vacated space. So here’s a list of the things I had to release and what I got instead:

* I surrendered memories of day-to-day life with Mike. I got a deeper understanding and love for Mike. 

* I surrendered having a co-parent to carry the load. I got an incredibly tight relationship with my kids.

* I surrendered my refusal to ask for help. I got more meaningful connections with family and friends, along with a better quality of life from all the help! 

* I surrendered the idea that life is fair. I got the idea that life is full of mystery.

* I surrendered my purpose of being Mike’s wife and a family woman. I got new, multiple purposes: using my own experience to get people thinking differently about their own potential; changing the conversation around death; championing DEI at my workplace.

* I surrendered a singular, deep love with one person. I got myriad, wide love with endless people.

* I surrendered being just a regular human. I got a glimpse of the superhuman in me. 

The last one sounds a little goofy but it feels so real. I can literally feel the space between my molecules growing bigger, like my being — my potential, my power, my impact — is expanding.

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Surrender is the portal through which we access the next version of ourselves. 

Without my sense of control shattering into its constituent atoms, my life would have stayed good… and small. Looking back at it from my 2.0 perspective, I would be sad for Sue 1.0. Because the fullness of life on this side — the awe and connection and purpose — is off the hook. It’s immense. It sparkles. 

Aikido teaches its practitioners that surrender is a choice they can make — not just something we have to be shoved unceremoniously into.

This gives me hope. There’s a way to not just fall into surrender like a boneless chicken, flopping to the ground.

There’s a way to work with the twists and turns of life, rather than using up all our energy trying to predict, prevent, or “correct” them.

There’s a way to feel like life is more of a dance and less of a fight.

From this perspective, surrender is essentially just a pivot to ensure the wind of reality is always at our backs. And we can trade in our F-150 engines for sails, going faster and further than we ever could on our own willpower alone.

Following the wind,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #2: Why I wouldn’t trade away the grief. While I would give anything to have my late husband back, my life is more vibrant, more meaningful, more miraculous thanks to the lessons of grief and loss.

* #17: Mystery is my religion. We can’t escape chaos. But we can reframe it.

* #22: The resilience experiment. If you can learn from “failure” without self-judgment, you can be resilient.

* #34: Acceptance is just the beginning. The powerful first step to rebuilding after losing so much.

* #42: Made to heal. Practicing what I preach when faced with an empty nest.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

“When I paused to contemplate the life I had worked so hard to build, I felt a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear.” 

This line from Midlife: A Philosophical Guide by MIT philosophy professor Kieran Setiya made me flinch. I was caught off guard by its bleakness… and its truth.

But I was also confused by my reaction. Besides the whole dead husband thing, my life is pretty good from the outside. And a decent amount of time, it’s good from the inside too. I have two lovely kids in college, I’ve successfully climbed the corporate ladder, I’ve built and live in my dream home, I travel the world, I have a passion project that jumpstarts me out of bed every morning. 

Still, I knew exactly what Setiya was talking about. The moment when you look forward at the future and it looks a little bit too much like the past and the present. The moment you realize you’ve been climbing for so long it feels less like you’re on a ladder and more like you’re on a hamster wheel. The moment you see that what you had imagined of life is not what it turned out to be… and you’re running out of time to change that.

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Life sometimes feels like a series of projects. Plan. Do. Complete. Repeat.

Setiya calls these goal-oriented activities telic. I train for an Ironman and complete it. I get my MBA, then get a better job, and a better job, and a better job. I have children, I provide for them, I launch them out of the nest.

Atelic activities we do just for the hell of them. Sing along to George Michael’s greatest hits on the car stereo. Bird watch in Great Falls Park. Lazily sip a latte.

Unsurprisingly, as a society we are much more focused on telic activities. It’s how we make money after all. I don’t see a lot of employers offering to pay me for my car-stereo singalongs. But, besides money, telic accomplishments are how we measure success in general. So we fill our time with things that have a purpose, like getting the next promotion, saving up for our dream vacation, buying the house/car/boat we’ve always wanted.

However, Setiya points out that when we are so invested in activities with an end in mind — telic activities — we destroy our meaning every time we complete one. 

“The way in which you relate to the activities that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and so expel them from your life. Your days are devoted to ending, one by one, the activities that give them meaning… As if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.”

This is the dirty little secret behind the achievement ethos. It’s never enough. It’s short-term happiness. It’s a scam. And with our busy lives, we’ve left the atelic activities to atrophy. We can’t turn to them for solace when our telic ones predictably drain of meaning.

Setiya comes to the same conclusion, “If my problem is an excessive investment in telic activities, the solution is to love their atelic counterparts — to find meaning in the process, not the project.”

Ah, yes. Enjoy the process. 

It’s about the journey not the destination. Focus on the next step rather than the summit. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Platitudes, you’re up!

If you’re rolling your eyes right now, you’re in good company. I agree that focusing too much on achievement seems unhealthy… but being told to “enjoy the process” feels glib. First of all, easier said than done. The achievement grooves in my brain have been ingrained for 50+ years. Second of all, accomplishment still feels so damn good! When Leona and I produce a great post. When the team closes an important deal at work. When a new recipe turns out spectacularly. When I make a measurable, noticeable difference in someone’s life through my words or actions. I love the telic. I love training my eyes on the telic prize and soon after cradling the telic trophy in my arms.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it. It feels so damn good in the moment, for a moment… then the moment is over. And we are left in search of our next mechanism for fulfillment and happiness. Over and over and over and over. Hamster wheel, baby.

I sigh at Setiya. In my mind, he smiles back. He’s on the ride with us, simultaneously irritated and intrigued by his own findings.

But, seriously… how? How can we pivot our focus from the destination to the journey? From the telic to the atelic?

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Yes, we could focus on the atelic things that have nothing to do with accomplishments. 

Alien things we’d call “hobbies” (thanks Oliver Burkeman for pointing them out in 4,000 Weeks). But it's easy to make excuses for hobbies: no time, not important enough, nothing I’m into or good at (because, let’s be honest, we’ve let all our hobbies disintegrate in the face of their “productive” counterparts). 

Setiya instead recommends slowing down and noticing the process of accomplishing things. 

I think about this in terms of mentoring people at work. Yes, I want to be the best mentor I can be, as measured by the thriving of my mentees, their personal success, their career growth. But what I’ve come to most relish about mentoring is just the minutes spent together. Talking to Mark about his son. Talking to JeNean about her family. Talking to Sarah about books. Talking to Mac about his team. It is in the moment — the moment of connecting, the moment of laughing, the moment of being — that I enjoy mentoring most. Not at the end of the job. Not staring at the measuring stick to know I have succeeded. 

So… wait! Maybe I am not as accomplishment-oriented as I think. And maybe you aren’t either. Maybe the process of getting to our accomplishments holds all the magical moments we need to create meaning and have a fulfilling life. But we don’t notice these moments. We cannot relish in them. Because our foot is to the floorboard, and when roaring through life at 200mph, it’s impossible to appreciate the scenery whirring by.

Have your accomplishments. Strive for your goals. But slow the f* down in getting there. Pause. Notice. Look around. Whenever you can manage to remember, be in the moment as you climb the mountain, rather than assuming that only the summit is worth your presence. This will not take you out of your life. This is life. 

“Living in the present is not a suspension of ordinary life, but a way of being immersed in it,” as Setiya puts it.

(This also buffers us from the blow when we don’t achieve our goals. We still had the magic moments along the way giving us meaning. A lack of achievement cannot take those away.)

“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard’s famous words may be horribly overused but are still true. 

If you look at your life to find only a string of days focused on desired outcomes — an endless slog to reach endless goals — that cannot possibly spell happiness or contentment. Foregoing the sprint, slowing to a stroll, we can take the nectar of each moment and nourish ourselves with the meaning that lives there — meaning that will carry us through the ups and downs that chasing purpose will always include.

Next summer I am planning to do a pilgrimage walk across Sweden and Norway. Thirty days of walking from the Baltic to the Atlantic. Sounds pretty telic; it literally has a beginning and an end. But the atelic moments inspired by this journey have already started to flower in the space between here and there. Conversations with the shoe department lady at REI about things other than hiking boots, blisters, and socks. Goofy jokes with my trainer Kavon as I do 1,000 box-step-ups in preparation.

And even more are on the horizon: during the trek when I sit down to dinner with a Scandinavian family hosting me overnight and learn about their life. Noticing barns and churches, brooks and streams, open vistas and foothills. Processing my loss without worrying about the kids for the first time. 

We have this subconscious narrative that if we are too happy with the here and now, we’ll stop wanting to climb mountains and achieve goals. But it’s the other way around. Immersing ourselves in the process makes the summit so much more satisfying.

And, when we look back at our lives, we won’t just see pinpoints of accomplishment surrounded by emptiness and wonder where all the time has gone.

We’ll see an entire Milky Way of both accomplishment and enjoyment, purpose and presence, satisfaction and fulfillment.

To the journey and the destination,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* Post #18: Purpose isn’t the destination. Frustration and the feeling of being alive.

* Post #24: Skin in the game. Relying on our senses to get us out of our head and into our lives.

* Post #35: Enough waiting to “rest in peace”. Appreciating the good things in life while we’re still around to do it.

* Post #41: The epic power of an inspired heart. Adding fuel to the flames of our goals and desires.

* Post #46: It’s all possible now. Awakening to freedom at the top of the world.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

After visiting family in Houston, going to an idea conference in Munich, traipsing through countryside museums in Copenhagen, the thing I’ll miss most from my two-week Empty Nester World Tour was the austere beauty of Greenland. Which is a surprise.

Greenland is a little… bleak. When I last visited in 2018, I was glad to get the work trip over with and return to the actual green land of Virginia. But this time, the vast emptiness of the space was a breath of fresh air. A place where I could just be and enjoy the act of being, without trying to fill that space with doing.

There is something about not having to do anything. No expectations, no should’s, no regrets. In Munich or Copenhagen, I felt like not visiting a museum or not walking the city was somehow squandering my time. In Greenland, when there was nothing to do, it was actually a pleasure.

I’ve found myself in a mental space much like Greenland. For the first time in my life, my future is wide open. I’m a 54-year-old widow, and there are no sanctioned, prescriptive, you-must-do-this-or-prove-that paths for the likes of us. There are no should’s… here or in Greenland.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Specifically, I was visiting the Pituffik US Space Base. 

It's 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle and totally out of the ordinary human experience. Because most people (besides the Inuit) have never experienced land or days or climate like this, the location feels like it has a no rules, no framework, no norms for how to be and act. Things as basic as sleeping and eating schedules, running errands, hanging out with friends look entirely different here.

Very few human beings want to be stationed in Greenland. But I met a young Danish woman working at our base who loves it, who says she never wants to work anywhere else. She said she appreciates the simplicity of life and the closeness of the small community. In other words, she sees Greenland for what it has, not what it doesn’t have. She’s not trying to impose the norms — the should’s — of the rest of the world onto it. Societal norms on natural beauty (icebergs and tundra anyone?). Societal norms on what happy living requires (Malls! Movie theaters! Fancy cars! Whole Foods! Nail salons!). 

We spend so much time trying to have what everyone else has and do what everyone else does, because if everyone has/does it, it must be a good idea (famous last words). Even in 2018, a year and a half after Mike’s death, I was still trying to figure out what came next. Notice the phrasing: not what I wanted to do next, but “what came next.” What I was supposed to do next.

Stepping onto Greenland was like stepping into a space where ‘supposed to’ had ceased to exist… and in 2018 I hated it. It didn’t feel productive enough — I had s**t to do and Greenland was just sitting there silently, staring at me! And it was true, I had teenagers to raise, college saving accounts to fill, and an internal sense of security to rebuild from the ground up. With luck, stubbornness, and plenty of help, I did all of those things. And now I can see what Greenland the place and Greenland the inner state have to offer. 

Mike’s death slingshotted me out of the mainstream storyline.

The safe orbit of the solar system where I knew what to expect and what came next and what counted as “successful” was in a moment all out of reach.

It took a massive amount of effort to get back on my proverbial feet, but now that I have… holy smokes. It’s like I’ve re-oriented my life to my own center of gravity (because I had to), while so many are still orbiting some ideal of a perfect life, falling into it but never quite reaching it. Not me. I no longer have a Sun of expectations, drawing me towards it.

This is the first time in my life where I don’t know what comes next. I can gather experiences, make connections, grow, and change without an objective or outcome. Without a metric for “success”. I can plan less. I can surrender more. I can just enjoy the continued journey of transformation. I can explore what it means to be a human in this world — to be me. 

It’s like I was laying on the ground, and the police drew a chalk outline around my body. The death of old me. Now, in a dreamlike state, I’m standing up and looking down at that empty chalk line, thinking, “Who was that, that very defined person? I don’t even recognize that one-dimensional representation of me! I am not defined that way anymore.”

It’s hard to not just throw a million metaphors down on the page. Because this feeling is visceral rather than intellectual. I am free in a way I didn’t know I could be.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

The light in Greenland is the same way.

Even with another million metaphors, I couldn’t impart its clarity and simultaneous mysticism to you through these clunky words.

Which is actually refreshing. I don’t have to turn it into a question to be answered — ie “why do I feel this beauty?”

I can just let it wash through me like an electrical current or however the hell it feels when we are moved. I’ve made enough space between the molecules of my body between 2018 and 2023 that this mysterious force can then take up that empty space and make me feel something. Something grand and majestic and undefinable. 

It’s like the “question” or even “problem” of my future. What now? I don’t have to answer that question. I can just let the feeling of spaciousness move me, and see where I end up.

In possibility,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* Post #3: What are we actually afraid of? Why dissecting our fears around death & dying is key to living a better life.

* Post #11: Restoring the magic of time. How stepping (or being shoved) off the hamster wheel helps us reclaim our sense of possibility, serendipity, and flow.

* Post #17: Mystery is my religion. We can’t escape chaos. But we can reframe it.

* Post #24: Skin in the game. Relying on our senses to get us out of our head and into our lives.

* Post #35: Enough waiting to “rest in peace.” Appreciating the good things in life while we’re still around to do it.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

On the final day of my ENWT (Empty Nester World Tour; more on this next week), I was tucked into my own bed for the first time in two weeks. 

My brain was fried, swirling between Copenhagen and Greenland time zones. As I attempted to delay my descent into sleep until at least 8:30pm, I picked up my phone and scrolled. Landing on the New York Times Book Review, I cocked an eyebrow at the headline. Then obviously I clicked. 

The author Craig Fehrman recounts how his son Henry “dissolved into tears… so intense that he couldn’t speak” when Fehrman had asked him if he liked the ending of The Wild Robot. Since Henry was the type of kid that “politely declined to engage with The Grinch, even as his parents promised that Christmas would ultimately be saved”, Fehrman figured Henry wouldn’t be finishing the other books in Brown’s trilogy. Instead, Henry read the first two Wild Robot books over and over again while waiting for the third volume to be released. He was even the main character, Roz the robot, for Halloween.

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Fehrman, or more accurately Henry, highlighted an idea I’d been dragging around with me during my travels… quite literally in the form of a Harvard Business Review article featuring Bruce Springsteen. I’d found this double-underlined, chicken-scratch-annotated printout in a red folder that must’ve been lost under my desk years ago.

While its original purpose had been inspiration for my remarks at a virtual leadership gathering during the quarantine of 2020, it served as TL inspiration this time around. I was specifically drawn to a term coined by HBR author Gianpiero Petriglieri to describe Springsteen’s leadership style: resilient hope. 

“The kind of hope borne of staring at the truth — especially the truth of loss and fear — without losing faith. A hope that takes you through hardship, not away from it,” Petriglieri explains. 

He goes on, “It is through art that the unspeakable and the unheard find a voice… That is why the artist’s leadership is usually trustworthy: It either speaks to and for people, or it has no power at all.”

Between Springsteen and Roz, something clicked. There’s been a loophole all along in our resistance to talking about the “hard things”. It’s in art, in entertainment, in the pastimes we seek out when we want to feel something. And it turns out, we don’t just want to feel the good things. We don’t want cotton-candy sweetness that hurts our teeth. Those types of art and artists would have “no power” as Petriglieri puts it. 

But give us an Adele breakup album, or The Titanic, or even Shakespeare’s borderline gibberish Romeo and Juliet… And we eat it up like a starving man given his first meal in weeks. 

So are we big fat liars that don’t know our own minds? Or have we forgotten something about the emotional process… And the ways in which we are hardwired to work through pain, rather than skirt around it.

We are pleasure-seeking animals, not masochists. 

It just turns out that there is pleasure in acknowledging and releasing pain. 

Researchers found that our brains literally release endorphins (the body’s in-house version of opiate painkillers) during sad movies, which reduce our sensations of physical and emotional pain. (They tested this by making people watch sad movies and then do wall sits. Imagine a bunch of puffy-eyed research subjects being directed to do their first wall sit since high school immediately after watching Schindler’s List, wondering what the hell is going on.)

In other words, hidden inside the sensation of grief is its own antidote. And without fully understanding why, we’ve been creating and seeking out sneaky places to have the emotional release that triggers the cathartic endorphin relief. But that’s not all. We’re also practicing being hopeful on the other end of a movie that has just torn our guts out.

As Brené Brown puts it, “Hope is a function of struggle… We develop hope not during the easy or comfortable times, but through adversity and discomfort.” (If the podcast gods are listening, I think Springsteen and Brown would have a hell of a conversation.) Hope is by it’s very nature resilient. And we have found a way to build that resilience by exposing ourselves to struggles that are not our own but still feel real through art and entertainment.

It’s as if our brain has been tricking us into taking our resilience vitamins by wrapping them in the sweet fruity gelatin of art and entertainment.

As a grief writer, I am relieved. As a member of society, I’m a little confused. Why are we so resistant to just feeling our feelings, while simultaneously looking for a way to process them through someone else’s feelings? Maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe I should just be glad it’s happening at all. 

But I look back at Old Sue, who avoided sad songs like the plague but inhaled sad books like a sleeve of Oreos, holed up in her room for hours on end. She didn’t know that she was secretly processing her emotions, and because of that, they continued to scare her. Her conscious mind was still on high alert, shutting down so many experiences for the sake of preserving her cold hard exterior. I want her to know what she was secretly, subconsciously doing — taking her resilience gummies! I want her to know that she was stronger, more flexible, more adaptable than she realized. I want her to know that emotions couldn’t break her, even though she was terrified of them. I want her to know that releasing her death grip of top-down control was the right path all along.  

I am so grateful to artists and entertainers for giving us an outlet. But I want more from the audience. I want recognition of what we’re doing. I want you to own it. Because I want you to trust that when tragedy inevitably strikes, you are capable of surviving it.

You’ve been taking your resilience gummies, your endorphin system is up and running — you just have to remember that you already know how to ride the waves of pain to the shores of relief.

While noodling on the impact of art in my post-loss life, I couldn’t shake another example of emotional processing through entertainment.

It is decidedly not highbrow. Not even midbrow, like a young readers fantasy trilogy or Springsteen… It’s a Marvel movie. Avengers: Endgame. (This is your official spoiler alert by the way!)

For the Marvel-averse (or those just re-entering pop culture after living under a rock for years), the scene I am thinking of is, surprise surprise, a death scene. Iron Man saves the world in an epic end-of-movie battle. And loses his life in the process.

In our Deagle before-times, Marvel movie viewing was a family affair. The last movie we saw as a family was Dr. Strange, just one week before Mike died. (In fact at the hospital, I remember asking the ER doc, “Didn’t you shock him with the white paddles like in Dr. Strange??”) 

When Avengers: Endgame was initially released, I gave it a wide berth until I could watch it alone at home. I didn’t know what the ending would be but I did know not everyone was going to make it out alive, and I wanted complete visual and audible privacy to let my emotions flow. And flow they did. All I remember from that initial viewing was sobbing and sobbing during that final scene. And then the feeling of cathartic relief I have come to know was right around the corner (thanks endorphins, you’re the best).

Fast forward to the present, where the Marvel Universe has a special place in my heart… but I still didn’t think it would resonate in this post about emotional processing through art. Even though I had sent myself two emails with MARVEL in the subject line in the past week (my very sophisticated system for keeping track of TL ideas during work.)

But then I boarded another airplane.

Side note: I have a terrible problem with the ‘cone of distraction’. I find myself inanely drawn to what’s playing on the screen of the passenger next to me. I’d just met Daniel — a Danish team member — when I sat down next to him for the Air Greenland flight. For the first four hours, I’d tried with marginal success to tear my eyes away from his screen. Then in the final hour, he pulled up one last movie. 

Avengers: Endgame.

Well, ok, damn. Message received. I watched the final scene, side-eye, no sound. Then sent one more email to myself to include the scene in this post. 

Back at home, I pulled up YouTube to hear what’s actually being said. 

As Iron Man aka Tony Stark’s friends gather around him weeping, his wife Pepper leans in close and looks into his eyes. He holds her hand with his last bit of strength. 

 “Tony, we are going to be ok. You can rest now,” she says.

Sitting on my couch, nestled into the Treehouse on that gorgeous rainy day, fall leaves beginning to swirl and water racing down my rain chain, I once again sobbed.

I said something similar to Mike. He was already gone when I said it. But I held his hand and said it anyway…. “It’s going to be ok, baby. It’s going to be ok.”

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Yes, it's a movie. 

Yes, they are wearing robot suits and just saved the universe from an alien warlord. But in the end it is a human experience. And watching this imaginary family go through it just like my flesh-and-bone family did helps. Through the fictional mirror of tragedy, I feel connected to humanity as a whole. I get a safe place to cry about the grief that is mine and the grief that is human too. And I am a little better prepared to face the hard stuff ahead, because I know we’ve all been doing it for generations.

We think we won’t survive pain, but we’re built to… if we let ourselves feel it. Relief follows release. Hope follows struggle. Resilience is just what we’re made of.

As Fehrman says about The Wild Robot, “Roz gave Henry a reason to push through the first book’s sad parts. She also gave him a model for how to make sense of those sad parts — for how and why to keep trying until he was ready to appreciate that, sometimes, sadness isn’t a bad thing to feel.”

If there is an eight-year-old finishing a book that makes him sob and immediately engulfing the next, maybe pain is not as detrimental as we imagine it to be. Maybe it's even essential to living a vibrant life.

In resilient hope,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* Post #14: Things will be great again. Giving each other permission to believe in the future while honoring the pain of the present.

* Post #22: The resilient experiment. If you can learn from “failure” without self-judgment, you can be resilient.

* Post #30: The beautiful, the painful, the dazzling. How I learned from loss to be unafraid of life.

* Post #32: I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. It’s time to rewrite, and rewire, the narrative of suffering and struggle.

* Post #39: From lifequake to lemonade. The way you tell your story matters.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

I never had a mother-in-law. Mike’s mom Mary Ann died four years before his Mediterranean blue eyes and angular jaw caught my attention in the picture line on our first day of grad school.

There was no evidence of this catastrophic loss on the surface of Mike’s life. But like gravity, her presence — or more accurately, her absence — was an invisible yet inescapable force in the early years of our relationship. 

The ocean-deep, unconditional love he had shared with his mom defined how Mike believed love could and should feel. But that love was also frozen in time, idealized, and used as an impossible measuring stick for our young, everyday, learning-the-hard-way, flesh-and-blood love.

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Because of this experience — the years it took us to deconstruct Mike’s unrealistic expectations for love — I have a very different relationship with nostalgia than most. Its otherworldly romanticization has always had a sinister gleam. And yet, even I find myself wrestling to avoid its trap.

Just three weeks into my empty nest, I’m noticing the ways that my mind already wants to paint the dirty dishes and piles of laundry and endless eye rolls in the rosy shade of yesteryear. And I’m wondering if we can accept that there will always be parts of the past that we long for… without diminishing our satisfaction in the present moment.

Times of cataclysmic change make us long for control.

After a major disruption, we find ourselves desperately squinting through our fogged-up windshield into the darkness of our unknown future. With limited visibility and too much adrenaline, we have no choice but to put the car in gear and drive on, braced for a hairpin switchback or abrupt dead end. 

During these times, remembering the past in it’s best light offers us a taste of the safety and assuredness we so sorely long for.

(Oh, how our coping mechanisms always seem so innocent in the beginning!)

In The Future of Nostalgia, Dr. Svetlana Boym writes, "There should be a special warning on the sideview mirror: The object of nostalgia is further away than it appears."

"Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy."

I’ve written before about how forgetting some of the messy details of a person can help us love them more fully. Forgetting is the fast track to forgiveness. With the rough edges of stale disagreements and disappointments sanded away, we are able to step back and appreciate the broad strokes of the human being (or time of life) that once was.

However, as Dr. Boym explains, we can take this memory curation too far — into full-fledged revision. To that point, she breaks down the two ends of the nostalgia spectrum:

Reflective nostalgia is the feeling of longing that we can’t avoid. We miss what we had in the past. It’s painful but it’s actually healing: we understand that the past is in the past. Allowing ourselves to feel that pain helps us to be more present, because we understand that life is fleeting and we have to enjoy it while we can.

Then there is restorative nostalgia, which is the feeling that we can somehow recreate not just the past, but our fantasy of the past.

While reflective nostalgia is painful but inevitable and even helpful, restorative nostalgia is problematic, crippling our path forward in two distinct ways:

* When we mythologize the past as perfect, we create a deeper sense of imperfection in the present.

* By believing we can recreate the past, we are side-stepping the pain of loss. The longer we avoid grief by believing that we can go backwards, the more painful it becomes to rejoin the present.

Mike didn’t believe he could bring his mom back to life. But he thought he could recreate the idealized love, support, safety, and sense of belonging that they had shared… which was a figment of his grieving imagination anyway.

Mike deserves a mountain of credit for releasing that fantasy for the sake of our love and our family.

I can’t imagine how hard it was to pull himself away from that dream into a reality that felt painful by comparison. But he did it.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Mike would refer to his mom as ‘Saint Mary Ann’ to the point where it was even a joke in our house: once you die, all your scratchy moments are forgotten! The times you lost your temper, missed a carpool, forgot a swim meet evaporate. You are a god among mortals. We’d also level-set our conversations about her saintliness with funny anecdotes from Mike’s childhood along with the ways in which Mary Ann’s life was hard. We made her into a real person, the real person she always was. 

A real person just like us.

By embracing that the past does not have to be idealized to be cherished, we can learn to love the present in the same way. And by realizing that the present is bursting with imperfect love but love nonetheless, we are able to look back and love what was, without changing a thing.

I remember the moment when it fully set in for Mike — and for me, through him: reality doesn’t have to be perfect to be perfect.

No matter how idyllic the daydream, it can never hold a fraction of the fulfillment and satisfaction that comes from being fully immersed in the present moment.

It just doesn’t count if our bodies don’t get to experience it.

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Restorative nostalgia is at it’s core another avoidance technique.

We find a way to believe that we can somehow go backwards in order to not feel the full weight of what we have lost — which is a miserable combination of the person (or time in our life) along with the opportunity to fully appreciate them while they were around.

But healing doesn’t work that way.

We must make the sadness, the longing, the hard, tough, tear-inducing, exasperating, ‘when will I be past this?’ feeling part of us. We must befriend it, not reject it. We must accept that some pain will always exist. We can’t treat that feeling like Pluto and say they were never really a planet anyway. We can’t just refuse to pick them for our kickball team. We can’t paint over them using restorative nostalgia. 

We have to make the pain a part of us. 

I’ve been asked so many times how I was able to let Mike’s death transform me rather than simply destroying me. My answer is always evolving because I’m still figuring it out myself… But as I write this, it’s clear that having a front-row seat as Mike excavated his frozen-love-fantasy-nostalgia-grief-pit was part of my saving grace.

I just knew that path was a trap. I knew that I had to bear full witness to all I had lost without sugarcoating a thing. I knew that trying to avoid an ounce of the pain would just cause it to fester and create more pain in the future. And I was stubborn enough to believe that I could figure out another way.

Despite the stories that swirl around the collective about grief, we are strong enough to hold the paradox of pain and love and loss and gratitude and regret without rewriting history.

There’s one more piece here... A piece about the way we relate to reality in general. When we acknowledge the imperfections of the people or times that are no longer here, we also get closer to accepting the imperfections in ourselves. We remember that no one, no time, no thing ever has been or ever will be perfect. And it’s all worth loving and enjoying anyway.

We don’t need to hide from ourselves or from reality. We just need to embrace our humanity.

And with that, I think it’s time harass Connor and Kendall. Living with them wasn’t always a walk in the park, but I still miss them to bits.

In love with reality,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #42: Made to heal. Practicing what I preach when faced with an empty nest.

* #38: Reclaiming loss from the grip of avoidance. Evolving our relationships with those we have lost (part 2).

* #34: Acceptance is just the beginning. The powerful first step to rebuilding after losing so much (featuring Chris Hemsworth).

* #29: Learning from laughter to trust my tears. When we feel, we heal.

* #23: Forgetting in order to remember. How the memory chisel clears our path forward.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

“You are going to let a 16 year old drive that?” Connor was pointing to our pint-sized silver Subaru CrossTrek parked in the driveway. Permit acquired, it was time to get behind the wheel. All that was missing was some genuine interest in learning how to drive. 

While I was excited, Connor was, as always, cautious — running through the actuarial tables firmly embedded in his mind since birth, assessing the risk.

“Dude, listen, this is the part where you learn how to drive! Uncle Richie and I will teach you. But you have to get behind the wheel,” I said. “It takes actual practice.”

I continued, “I need another driver around here. It would be a big help to get you to school and your sister to the barn.”

Although the dial on his risk-o-meter was deeply in the red zone, he reluctantly nodded his head. I then pulled out a thin Amazon shipping envelope and slid a bright yellow bumper sticker out, handing it to him.

“Here you go, this will go on the back of the Subi. That way other drivers will give you a break.”

He tilted his chin, scrunched his eyebrows, and from his six foot height, peered an inscrutable look down at me. Then he headed out the door to take his first drive with Richie.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Two years later, I could not find the bumper sticker when it was Kendall’s turn. So I ordered a brand-spanking new one and presented it to her. She burst out laughing.

“Mom, over my dead body are we putting that thing on the car,” she said.

“But Connor had one on his car! And the entire purpose is to help other drivers cut you some slack!”

“Save your breath mom. Not happening,” she retorted. “And by the way, Connor never put that sticker on his car either, he just didn’t tell you.”

I was recently reminded of the ‘Student Driver’ bumper sticker.

A signature New Orleans trolley car trundled past with a giant IN TRAINING sign affixed to the back.

Instead of ignoring the trolley like I would have if I hadn’t seen the sign, I paused and waved at the new driver — definitely like a mom to their kid in a play. But I couldn’t help it! I was excited for him. Any expectation I had had of perfection from this driver was immediately replaced by compassion and curiosity. I went back to my walk smiling, wondering how training was going for him… how hard is it to drive a trolley anyway… 

We are all beginners at some point. But we’re ashamed to admit it, trying to move past the novice stage as fast as possible. Why? Why not revel in the fact that we have a great reason to:

* have no idea what’s going on;

* try and to fail without expectations;

* learn something new that could improve our lives?

We don’t want to admit we’re beginners like we don’t want to admit that change, pain, or loss is inevitable. 

While beginnings and endings are (seemingly) at opposite ends of the spectrum, both make us feel exposed and out of control. We get scared! We pretend we know exactly what’s going on — to others, but even to ourselves. We trade in both our vulnerability and our sense of adventure for the promise of a boring, stable, controlled life (which, spoiler alert, isn’t going to pan out.) 

But if we’re going to get shoved into learning new things and transition and loss anyway, what are we really missing by fighting it?

Grace — the opportunity to both give it and receive it.

We are all in this together. 

Embracing the times we have no idea what we are doing helps us remember that.

Take the IN TRAINING sign on the trolley. Those two little words reminded me that the driver was human and fallible and probably trying to not sweat through his shirt just like me. I was immediately connected to him, even though I know nothing about him nor trolleys. All I know, and need to know, is what it feels like to be out of my element and trying to do my best.

In fact, we could simplify the sign to one word: TRYING. The universal struggle.

By admitting we are trying, we turn strangers into comrades.

By admitting we are doing the best we can, we give others permission to admit they are trying (and maybe messing up) too.

By admitting that we don’t know how to leave a comment on a google doc, we get to laugh over our humanity rather than being embarrassed by it (true story). 

After Leona and I had a good long cackle over my mistake, not only did I learn something new, but we got a memorable story and grew a little closer. I wasn’t scolded or embarrassed, I was loved. Only psychopaths go for the jugular when amateurs attempt. Most of us just do everything in our power to support the beginner, while cheering our heads off.

As much as life today can feel like an unending Celebrity Deathmatch — claymation pieces of our soul strewn about the ring — one of our deepest desires as humans is connection. But we are half of that connection equation. It’ll happen a whole lot faster if we stop pretending to be too cool for school and admit we have no idea what we’re doing.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

At work, I am the first to say, “I don’t get it.”

Whatever the topic is, if I don’t understand it I am not shy about saying so — no matter how many people are listening.

Yes, I have built up credibility in other areas — I am a senior executive; I have some accumulated reputational capital that makes this easier for me. Which is exactly why I’m always the first. It is both a fact that I’m confused, and a leadership jujitsu move.

True leaders don’t try to be perfect — aka demoralizing and insufferable. Instead, they lead by example: 

* admitting they don’t understand and allowing others to help them; 

* trusting their teammates to help them rather than embarrassing them;

* showing that it’s not only okay to be human, it’s normal!

Owning our humanity, our novice status, the fact that we are trying is liberating — for us and those around us.

Others feel more connected to us since we aren’t pretending to know how to do everything. And we just might find we actually enjoy beginnings: the moments when we feel pushed to our edge, challenged and supported at the same time, transforming into something better before our own eyes.

In training,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* Post #7: The art of receiving. It’s about you… but it’s also bigger than you.

* Post #13: We are not islands. Releasing the myths of isolation and avoidance.

* Post #15: The empowerment of not taking yourself to seriously. Sue Deagle, Despot (part 1).

* Post #25: Embracing my humanity (in the WSJ). Reclaiming the “unspeakable” aspects of existence.

* Post #26: Wired to share (despite what our culture tells us). Seeking sanity between evolutionary instinct and modern impulse.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Our mission as parents is to make ourselves obsolete. Like a carefully planned rocket launch, we gather the pieces, obsess over the best way to put them together, build a beautiful spaceship, follow the launch sequence. Then 3, 2, 1, liftoff!

We are left on the ground, watching the rocket soar into the crystal blue sky. But we go a step farther. We hand over the reins of Mission Control to our little rockets too. We set free the thing that we love and cherish most in the world. 

It’s a different sort of loss than the ones we’re often talking about here at The Luminist. It’s like we carefully remove our hearts from their protected pocket of ribs, upon which they grow legs and blow us kisses and promise to call every Sunday as they walk away. It’s a loss that we choose, but not for lack of love.

The exact opposite.

For the sake of those little rocket ship hearts that we love more than life itself…

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

In other words, I helped Kendall move into her Tulane freshman dorm room last week. 

We pushed a baby-elephant-sized forest green moving cart filled to the brim across campus in 105 degree heat with several hundred other bedraggled families. We divided and conquered set-up duties (I the unpacker, she the assembler). We channeled Mike and his mad skills at making everything look just so. (Cleverly hide the ugly extension cords leading to the fridge! Make sure the duvet cover isn’t inside out!) 

We had a few scratchy moments. New Orleans is not known for its straightforward street signage. We almost lost the car in a couple potholes. We disagreed over the ‘measure twice’ philosophy versus ‘wing it!’ ethos. But we did it. We Deagles have achieved our second and final liftoff.

I’m staying in NOLA a few days to make sure all is well before heading home. 

I’m writing you from that liminal space — on my own but just a few blocks from my newly excavated heart — tenderly fingering the edges of the deja-vu-inducing hole in my chest. 

I’ve been taking myself on walks so I don’t stew or harass Kendall too much; letting myself move through emotions as I move through the streets — proud, sad, excited, curious, wary. This is a new way of meeting loss and a change for me. Just actually meeting it. Saying, Hello, I was expecting you. Let’s go on a walk and get to know each other. 

Maybe it’s because I’m in New Orleans, a city bursting with life and heat and history in every square millimeter. Trees covered in Spanish moss span the streets like an outstretched arm, intent on shaking hands with their neighbor. Trios of senior citizens stroll the paths of Audubon Park at 6am, greeting me with a southern hello. Every street is a sweltering melting pot of Creole, French, Spanish, and Caribbean architecture, food, and music. And potholes the size of a Fiat. 

Maybe it’s because voodoo magic is seeping out of the sidewalk cracks under my feet, making me believe anything is possible. Maybe it’s because I spend every week writing about this and want to practice what I preach.

Whatever the reason, the hollowness is feeling much less gaping, much less gnawing, much less ‘it’s going to eat me alive!’ It feels… like love.

It was made from love, it holds the shape of love, it can and will be filled with love. 

This is not what I was expecting.

At the end of move-in day, the University hosts a session for parents. 

The notional purpose is to put our minds at ease. The school will take good care of our kids. The real purpose is to get us the hell away from our sons and daughters and moving along. 

The Provost, with kind eyes and years of experience swindling parents, knew exactly what to say to help us lean in when we wanted to turn around, “Being at the beginning of something is so rare. Revel in it.”

His words landed in the hole where my heart should be and immediately started to root. Not just for Kendall, but for me too.

Intellectually, we know that endings are generally replaced by beginnings. One door closes… another opens… blah blah blah. We also understand from physics class way back when that an empty void will suck something into it if given the chance. But it’s another thing entirely to actually feel it happening in the moment.

To walk around the dark side of the cycle of life and realize there is no difference between what we think of as an “end” versus a “beginning”. There’s just how we chose to sit with the unfolding moment.

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We are made to heal. 

Not to gloss over, paper over, avoid or ignore. To let the heartache become heartopen become heartfull. Even when it feels like our heart has been nuked into smithereens, it’s still there, beating its mortal promise: You live; you love. You live; you love.

Obviously sending my daughter to college is different in a million and one ways from losing my husband, but still it’s change, goodbye, heartache. However, it’s like my system now knows what to do:

* Embrace the wide range of emotions that are swirling around my head and heart and gut.

* Have patience that it will take time to fill this hole, and that there will be parts that are never filled.

* Accept that the process won’t be smooth. I’ll run into bumps, dead-ends, even New Orleans potholes.

* Let myself crumble in fear that I will not be able to make it across this pothole the size of the Mississippi… until I’m ready to gin up the courage and take the leap.

* Remember that loss is a part of any well-lived life.

“It works!! It actually works!!” I want to exclaim to seniors in the park (who likely already know.)

Living with loss is definitely not unicorns and rainbows or smooth sailing or “only up from here” — any of those nonsense things we are taught to expect if we just work hard enough or smash down our feelings. But it’s beautiful. And I’m finally open enough — to my emotions, to the impermanence of life, to the mystery woven through the chaos — that I can let myself be in awe of that beauty even when it’s making me cry at the same time.

By the time this is published, I’ll be back at home all alone. I’ll probably have to read this post again to remind myself that emptiness is just another way of saying “full of potential.”

But that’s okay. Even forgetting feels like part of the cycle. It keeps me honest, soft, and connected to the life-giving lessons of loss.

In breaking and in healing,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* Post #2: Why I wouldn’t trade away the grief. While I would give anything to have my late husband back, my life is more vibrant, more meaningful, more miraculous thanks to the lessons of grief and loss.

* Post #8: Then and now. How I’ve learned to let transformation unfold… rather than it being an uphill struggle.

* Post #12: How I became a heart-seeking missile (in a good way). The epic power of our hearts to take loss and turn it into even more love.

* Post #14: Things will be great again. Giving each other permission to believe in the future while honoring the pain of the present.

* Post #39: From lifequake to lemonade. The way we tell our story matters.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Retired Brigadier General Becky Halstead is a pint-sized human with the strength of a colossus. She was the first female West Point graduate to be promoted to General Officer, as well as the first female in U.S. history to command in combat at the strategic level. 

When Becky agreed to be our keynote speaker at a leadership event a few years ago, we were all eager to get a look inside the mind of this once-in-a-generation leader. She delivered, but not in the way we expected. Rather than getting into the nitty gritty of how to organize, strategize, and supervise, she focused on what got her out of bed every morning: inspiring people to be their best selves. 

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She shared this story, which still rings in my head two years later, “My dad asked me what I wanted to do after retirement, and I told him I wanted to be a motivational speaker. He was not impressed and shared with me that motivational speakers are entertaining but not impactful. Everyone just returns to their work and keeps doing the same thing. 

“I thanked my dad and told him I no longer wanted to be a motivational speaker — I wanted to be an inspirational speaker! Because an inspirational speaker ignites action and leads to actual change.”

Over my 30+ year career in corporate America, I have listened to a lot of “inspirational” speakers. 

Like Santa Claus and Christmas, peanut butter and jelly, motherhood and apple pie, keynote speakers are synonymous with corporate events.

Some of my more memorable speaker experiences include:

* An adventurer helping disabled people climb to Mount Everest base camp.

* A Blue Angel fighter pilot providing lessons on high-stakes teamwork. 

* The janitor-turned-Frito Lay exec who invented Flamin’ Hot Doritos.

And, at the time, I thought they were all full of crap. (Not Becky, she came after.)

Take the dude who helped disabled people climb to the base of Everest. While politely listening, nodding, and smiling through his speech, I was thinking, he is only doing that so he can get a freaking free ride to Everest himself!

I assumed every one of those guys was a scam. Not because they had earned my bottomless skepticism. Oh no, it wasn’t about them at all. It was about me.

I didn’t think I needed inspiration when I had will power, ambition, and a family to support. In my mind, inspiration was for idealists — aka people who needed to rely on their emotions rather than their self-motivation to get anything done.

But Becky was right. Now that I’m on the other side, it’s so clear. The mind on its own can’t come close to producing the innovation that’s possible when the heart is on board.

In the workplace we are not supposed to feel feelings — we are supposed to be robots. 

Somewhere along the line, we decided that the best worker — the most efficient worker — was the logical, unfeeling worker. While I still agree that using top-down control to cool haughty emotions is generally constructive, I think we’ve taken “mind over matter” a little too far. Because where do we source our values, our priorities, our passions if not from our emotions?

And where do we source the inner fire necessary to effect change, big change, if not the things that we love and care about?

I’m going to say something I can’t prove but I’m quite sure of: very few people do great things with logic and willpower alone. Though fortitude and grit are involved in every impactful endeavor, we need a reason to keep going. And as logically sound as a reason may be, if it doesn’t ignite the illogical passion of the heart, we’ll run out of steam.

This is the difference between motivation and inspiration that Becky’s father was getting at.

We are inundated with good, even great, reasons to be motivated (paychecks, promotions, or the flip side, failure, punishment, embarrassment). To the point that it’s clear we need something more.

We need to be driven from the inside, not just the outside.

Inspiration is so often visualized as spark. 

I think it's the spark that lights up the heart. The heart is already an engine after all — pumping oxygen molecules into the furnaces of our cells so they can be converted into the heat of life. 

Our minds feel cold in comparison. Their strength lies not in passion, but in discipline, in reason, in solving problems. Thus, when we try to complete a project solely from the head, we have to rely on these sterile tools. When we involve the heart in a mission (or better yet, are lucky enough to be able to let the heart pick the mission), we do more than add tools to our tool belt. We add fuel. 

That’s right, my corporate comrades, my workaholic besties, my willpower weightlifters, I’m talking to you.

Loosening the strictures, the contractions, the bungee cords tying down our emotions so we actually feel something seems risky. It requires vulnerability. We might get hurt. In fact, we probably will. But we’ll also get access to our own life force. We’ll be a body, mind, and spirit aligned. 

You might have heard of the hospital janitor who sees his job as saving lives. Pre-Mike’s death, this anecdote irritated me. The janitor himself was sweet enough, but I didn’t want people using his story as permission to pretend they were doing good when they just weren’t. I was listening with my cynical head instead of my feeling heart.

For better or worse, the universe knew exactly which of my buttons to push to flip that script. Turns out there actually was a life-expanding message under what I was interpreting as narcissistic fodder:

Finding a mission your heart can get behind saturates even the most mundane actions with meaning and purpose. Or as Simon Sinek puts it, “Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.”

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I asked my in-house guru what she thought inspiration was.

Kendall’s response: “Inspiration is organic. It just happens to you, you don’t control it.”

Maybe that’s the biggest lesson of all… and the reason we fight it so.

Allowing things we can’t control to influence our life scares us — even when those things are the emotions inside of us. Even when those emotions are pleasant. Even when they are trying to show us where we’ll find fulfillment!

But I think this is where our endlessly problem-solving minds can help. They can convince us that it’s worth it. Find whatever argument you need to allow inspiration — and the emotions that come with it — in.

Personally, Mike’s death shattered my illusion of control. And with that laying in a heap at my feet, it was much easier to welcome my “uncontrollable” emotions into my work and into my life in general. In the last six years, I have created more meaningful milestones than I had in the 15 before: I organized the Women’s Summit, designed and built my dream house, turned my crazy idea into a 700-subscriber newsletter, and got two kids through high school without anyone disowning anyone else.

If only Willpower Sue could see me now.

Even though I can’t ensure my life will be long, I can at least ensure that it will be full.

Full of passion, full of meaning, full of reasons to bounce out of bed in the morning, inspired to make a difference in the world.

With all my heart,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* Post #3: What are we actually afraid of? Why dissecting our fears around death & dying is key to living a better life.

* Post #9: Life beyond the Immaculate Reception. What we can learn from a Hall-of-Fame football veteran about leaving a legacy greater than our accomplishments.

* Post #12: How I became a heart-seeking missile (in a good way). The epic power of our hearts to take loss and turn it into even more love.

* Post #13: We are not islands. Releasing the myths of isolation and avoidance.

* Post #29: Learning from laughter to trust my tears. When we feel, we heal.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

By the time this reflection post (our ten-week pause-and-look-back ritual) is published, my Italy trip will have receded into the past.

But those two sun-drenched weeks have already left an impact in the halls of my mind. Framed pictures hang slightly askance. Spiderweb cracks climb the walls. Even the ground feels different, though I’m still figuring out just how deep the difference goes…

The effect is more subtle than Vesuvius blanketing Pompeii in ash but similarly sweeping. It’s like there’s a thin layer of magnifying prism particles on everything — giving the light and thus my entire life a feeling of faint, not unpleasant unfamiliarity. 

It’s like life has lost some of its mundanity. I’m not separating moments into special and standard anymore. It’s all special. It’s all worthy of my reverent examination. It’s all art. Maybe because in Italy art is everywhere. Even things that aren’t art are artistic. The cars, the cobblestones, the cappuccinos, the umbrellas dotting the lido jutting out into the sea.

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For example, there were these Mediterranean blue ceramic tiles in our Sorrento hotel. I was so moved by these tiles that I looked up their creator. Fausto Melotti turned out to be more than an incredible mixed media artist, he was also a teacher. And since I’m cautiously starting to identify everyone — including myself — as a creative, I was curious about his opinion on what makes a great artist:

“All our effort is to teach the little heroism behind the ability to think with your own brain.”

Sometimes while writing these posts I don’t feel like an artist.

I feel like the black-robed prophet of loss. The harbinger of weekly doom. The skunk at the garden party, relentlessly pointing out that everyone has something that stinks.

In these moments, I rhetorically cock an eyebrow at the heavens, wondering what I have done to deserve a mission to change the world, paired with a message that makes everyone want to stick their fingers in their ears and holler LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU. I don’t plan on stopping but damn… Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if I’m on the right track.

Which is why I was moved to tears when I received this text from my friend Dwayne:

Every week I am impacted positively and while I know it’s hard work on your end, it’s sincerely appreciated on this end! The Luminist has forced me to reflect on what’s really important in my life and treat people/see people differently. It’s allowed me to see my true calling: helping to develop young people!  “When two or more are gathered in my name…”- thanks and enjoy your weekend!

Dwayne didn’t say, “Thanks for helping me deal with loss, accept being afraid, and work on my ruminating brain better.” That may be the content of The Luminist, but it’s not the ultimate mission. They’re just the workouts that train us for the real mountain:

Daring to create the life we want, rather than settling for the life we have.

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This takes courage.

We have to pivot our effort — even just a slice of our effort — away from work, from obligations, from things we have decided we “should” do but drain us. We have to prioritize the things that actually fill our cup, fill our heart, make us feel alive. 

But first we have to discover what those things even are.

And then we have to let ourselves embrace them.

These both require “the little heroism behind the ability to think with your own brain” — rather than getting swept up in what we think everyone else thinks is "best”.

By talking about the tough stuff, we all get a little less afraid, a little more serious about our priorities, a little more aware of how precious life is, and a little closer to saying “screw it” and being the hero of our own story.

I’m here, alongside you, every week. Cheering you on, yes. But becoming — constantly becoming — the hero of my own evolving story as well. It feels good and scary at the same time. Just like being fully alive.

With just enough bravery,

Sue

The last ten posts:

(Is there one that holds the key to unlocking the next level of your little heroism?)

#30: The beautiful, the painful, the dazzling. How I learned from loss to be unafraid of life.

#31: Not all progress feels like progress. Sometimes it feels like limbo.

#32: I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. It’s time to rewrite, and rewire, the narrative of suffering and struggle.

#33: It’s okay to be afraid. Allowing fear to live, but not to rule.

#34: Acceptance is just the beginning. The powerful first step to rebuilding after losing so much.

#35: Enough waiting to “rest in peace”. Appreciating the good things in life while we’re still around to do it.

#36: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Harnessing the power of shared purpose to ignite your projects and passions.

#37: Moving on isn’t leaving behind. Evolving our relationships with those we have lost (part 1).

#38: Reclaiming loss from the grip of avoidance. Evolving our relationships with those we have lost (part 2).

#39: From lifequake to lemonade. The way you tell your story matters.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.