After

"Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something.

 You disturb the air as you go forward, you disturb the dust, the ground."

~Indira Ghandi

One of my favorite artists, Carrie Newcomer, has a song titled "Before and After". In it, she describes the way that trauma and tragedy strikes us--"The dust settles after a hit and run, bewildered by the damage done". The metaphor always catches me, with its sense of shock, bewilderment, confusion, and, if you have had a moment like this, that unique sensation of time coming to halt. Everything stopping. An end to the world as you know it. It seems as if nothing will ever be the same again.

And, in fact, it won't be. It will never be the same.

This is the first, maybe the hardest piece of learning--that it cannot ever be the same again. As Carrie says, our lives from that moment onward can be framed in terms of "before" and "after". These moments, seasons, experiences, are the watershed moments of life. They change us. They change everything.

Sometimes, it seems as though it takes everything in us just to get from before to after. We put our energy into surviving. We are not sure if we will make it. We keep on, maybe only because others are depending on us and quitting is not an option. We get up another day. Others move around us as if in a dream, as if life continues as always. We keep getting up again, another day and then another. And eventually, to our great surprise, we are through. Everything is not made better, things are not fixed, our loss has not been returned to us. But there is life on the other side of our pain. The question is now, what shall we do with it?

Everything has changed, and we are faced with choices. What does our path forward look like in the new world that has been created? One thing is clear--we can't remain the same. We can try, of course, and some do. But the space that used to hold us has shifted, and any attempt to go on living in the "before" will simply be a painful reminder that "before" is gone forever. As the circumstances of our lives change, our choices and responses must adapt to things as they are, not as they once were. 

Seeing things through new eyes, making new choices, is hard too. Now, not only must we realize that things will never be the same again, but we must learn to want something new. We must do battle with the lie that wanting something good for ourselves in the present is a betrayal of the past; we must tell ourselves the truth, in spite of what our deceitful hearts whisper--that the past is no longer here, and that it no longer requires our devotion. We must know that our love for what was torn away from us in the past is not diminished by our ability to find new life, new love, as our wounds heal and we begin to live in "after".

What happens to "before" then, once we are walking the path of "after"? Immediately after my divorce, someone close to me said, "Now it's time to take some time to heal before moving forward." How nice that would be.  :)  Unfortunately, the healing can only happen by this constant motion forward. Just sitting still or rolling up in a ball, thinking, "Now I'm going to get all healed up before I do anything else," while it sounds very appealing, is not moving away from "before" and toward "after". Healing is a process more like walking across a live minefield. We will only know what's out there when we come across it. "Before" does not disappear. It will never go away, nor should it.

What this means is that the dividing line between before and after is not a clear and bright one. They are inextricably intertwined with each other. Healing from the tragedy and trauma of the past can only be accomplished by moving steadily forward toward the future; the path to the future will always wind through the memories, losses, and fears that are the landmarks of the past. 

So if, like me, you're moving on today, know that moving into our "after" is not a betrayal or an abandonment of our "before".  We can move forward with no harm to what was worth keeping. And if, as we go, we sometimes encounter the pain and loss as well, we can't be discouraged. The dust that has settled in the wake of the impact will inevitably be stirred up again as we survivors struggle to our feet and begin to move away. But never fear--we are on the right path.