Loss, It is Never the End.

Death is not the end,

Death can never be the end.

Death is the road.

Life is the traveler.

The soul is the guide.

~Sri Chinmoy

There are many losses we have to deal with in our lives. They come in all manner of forms and often without knocking. The fact is that our World is about losses so to say. We lose in business, we lose in life, we lose time, we lose friends, we lose loved ones and even lose on love itself.

Accepting the loss however is another thing. It is never easy mostly because we associate loss with end and it can at some point halt our lives. We have all lost and interesting enough we never forget about the losses as often as we could have wished.

One person remarked that we can never run away from our pasts. Yes, we run but then we always realize that it is never far enough. What we do with appreciating this simple fact that we can never run far away from our losses as well goes a long way in determining whether life goes on or it stops after the loss.

I started this piece of article with a short poem from Sri Chinmoy about death. Death is so far one of the greatest losses we have to face; simply there are no second chances with it. A person dies once and that is it. So it’s a kind of scary loss.

A few weeks ago, a neighbor lost his sixteen year old son. I was fond of the young man because we could see each other occasionally. In fact I had seen this young man shortly after noon on the fateful day he died. When I came back later than evening, the cry of her mum caught my attention. I then learnt that the young man had passed away.

I tried asking myself how possible it would be for the mother to accept that truly she may not be able to see her son again. Probably the uniforms she had bought him were still new and in that house. So when she will be arranging her house she will be seeing all those reminders. Empty seat as well as empty room for the worst.

It will be hard for the mum to contend with the words of the poem I started with. But at some point she will learn to live along with them. That death is the road is the surest thing to remind all of us that we are walking on that same path too.

We have all lost a closest person to us and we can tell the pain that encompasses that. Greater still is the realization that we lost time along. We start regretting the time we never had with the loved ones. Probably you had planned to go out with a friend but then you kept postponing the meetings because you were ‘busy’ and then you wake up one morning and they are no more.

Loss of time is a huge loss I tell you. You live all along and then realize you were just losing time living someone else’s life as Steve Jobs remarked. It becomes bitter to learn that time lost cannot be recovered as well. But then there is hope that we can start all over again and still catch up.

Then there is loss incurred in a business. It is tough to convince an investor that you are worth investing in if you are making losses. The flip-side of this loss however is that there is always a way to turn things around. Of course we know businesses that were once loss making but are now turning in tonnes of profits. Second chances and starting again helps in this kind of loss a lot.

The other loss that has probably baffled scientists for a long time now is the loss of love. This is commonly known as heartbreaks. One young comedian makes fun asking how a woman in Kikuyu leaving his boyfriend who lives in Mwihoko affect the heart – a strong muscular organ pumping oxygenated blood to the rest of the body.

Unbeknown to us is the fact that a lot of hormonal chemistry comes to play in what we define as love. Dopamine, progesterone and other hormones go a long way in developing love and often it is not about the heart but rather the mind and the ‘general science of glands’ so to say.

With this type, there are second chances too. We love and lose. We love again and lose and we still keep giving it out best of the bargain. At some point we find love and love for good only for the past to remain not as a dictum of our present life but as a reminder of the path we have had to walk to make it to our present stage.

We lose friends as well and get new ones in equal measure. This is the maxim of the title of this article. That yes there is loss. We all lose in one way or the other but then that should never be the end in and of itself. Probably the rate at which we create new friendships should probably define how fast we bounce back to life after loss and realize life has to go on.

Truth be said, death is not the end. Death can never be the end. Death is just but the road. In other words, loss is not the end. Loss can never be the end. Loss is just but the road that we all must walk before we can reach our destinations.

And as for everything, trust me, life goes on. Till the end of time however, loss should never be our end.

End.

Post script:

There are people who lost everything; money, fame, loved ones, love, time and power yet they bounced back. As long as we don’t lose life (i.e we die), we have a chance to start over.