My grandmother eloped.
I don’t mean that she eloped 65+ years ago when she married my late grandfather. That was all very traditional. I mean last week, my 85y.o. widowed grandmother met up with her 84y.o. widower beau and ducked into the justice of the peace’s office and came out married. She’s over-the-moon happy and I am over-the-moon happy for her.
But in situations like this, there can be some unhappy reactions to someone seemingly “moving on” after a loss. In polite society, we can only have one spouse at a time. Emotions, however, are a different beast altogether. With wonder and awe, I consider how amazing it is that my Mimi (and each of us) can hold grief and sorrow over the loss of my grandfather and at the same time also hold joy and hope, neither diminishing the validity of the other.
I think sometimes we forget the infinite capacity that we possess to hold onto separate, disparate, often opposite-feeling complicated emotions all at the same time, that these feelings don’t cancel each other out but can be co-located. When we get caught in the myth of “one at a time,” we short-change ourselves and others.
- We might deny ourselves happiness that is right there for the taking because we don’t feel we can set down our sorrow.
- Or we might deny ourselves compassion and holding space for our very real suffering because we are currently in a situation of joy.
A few months ago, I participated in The BIG JOY Project. Twice a day there is an emotions check-in (seen here ►). I loved that it asked both about pleasant emotions and unpleasant emotions at each check-in. Typically, I would have picked the prevailing emotion — that’s what we tend to do. But this made me really stop and think and tease out from the great jumbled ball of positive and negative affect what exactly was going on. On one day, I was feeling pretty low, but because I was asked to also consider my positive emotions, it actually drew me out from the difficult feelings and let me have a much healthier perspective on where I was at emotionally.
Try it yourself. Take a week and check in on both the spectrum of pleasant emotions and the spectrum of the more difficult emotions. How many diverse feelings are you holding space for right now? Isn’t that amazing?