Note: I posted this on Instagram last week, but as I know that many of you are not on that platform, I wanted to share it here as well.
Highly sensitive people are highly attuned to the passage of time. This can show up as:
- Grieving each stage of your child’s life (baby no longer baby; little kid now big kid)
- Intense sadness about parents aging
- Nature’s splendor intertwined with pain
- Nostalgia for the past
- Seeing and feeling the birth-death-rebirth cycle all at once, in a single moment
- It also shows up as:
- Loving the people we love and this magnificent world fiercely and loyally
- Heightened access to creative expression and spiritual connection
- Passionately feeling joy, grief, and everything in between
The beauty and goodness are painful because we love it so much and we know it won’t last.
It’s like how we want every stage of our children’s lives to last forever. We don’t want them to stop growing and changing, but we don’t want to lose the deliciousness of the earlier stages.
We want spring and autumn and summer and sometimes even winter to last forever, even though we also don’t because then we wouldn’t have the splendor of the other seasons.
Why do we grasp so tightly to the things we love even when we know that more good things are coming? I don’t really know.
I only know that I love Maple’s brilliant red leaves juxtaposed to Aspen’s fluttering gold.
I love the leaves piled on the ground, surrounding cars on the city streets and creating gold blankets on grass lawns.
I love the autumn light and the way it filters through the trees as they are baring more of their limbs each day.
I love my children more than words could ever convey.
The love is bound up in the loss, and the loss is an expression of the love.
Beauty and ache are interwoven because time is responsible for change, and change is painful because it means leaving behind this good thing.
Nature is always teaching us about letting go. We cannot grasp on too tightly to Autumn’s exquisite beauty because we know it won’t last.
My sons at three and five and seven were so precious, but my sons at thirteen and eighteen are magnificent. 
The highly sensitive heart wants to hold onto it all.
One way to find peace around the fleeting nature of life and the existence of death is to learn how to dance with it. We breathe into the moments of grief instead of pushing it away. We breathe into the joy as well, and when the fear of losing what is good arrives on the heels of joy, we breathe into that, then transpose it into gratitude.
The more we breathe into all that is true, naming it collectively and feeling the pain and joy, the more expansive our hearts become, and the more we widen our channels for love. ♥️
For love is the thing that remains. Love is the through-line, the connective thread that weaves through this life and beyond, through the dying leaves and the changing ages and the passage of time. The grief and the love are bound up together, and we grieve so deeply because we love so deeply. Allowing for both widens the channels, and allows us remain in the flow of the river of life.
