Moments Pass

I went to a meeting this morning where one of the discussion points was about "being in the moment."  That's a difficult discipline no matter what our situation.  It is also a very helpful discipline if we want to be content and productive.

The conversation reminded me of what may seem to be an obvious fact.  The present moment is, in fact, only a moment.  The present moment becomes the past very quickly.  Moreover, our present emotions--whether positive or negative--are brief and temporary states.  "This too shall pass" applies to emotions more clearly than to almost anything else in life.  How we feel--good or bad-- is always temporary.

This isn't to say that love, for example, is just a temporary thing--not to be trusted or reciprocated.  No--in fact that is a feeling to which we can and do return over and over again.  If in fact we remained in one emotional state for a long period of time, we would become habituated to that state.  If we persisted in one emotional condition without a break for an extended period, it would no longer feel good.  We oscillate between emotional conditions many hundreds or even thousands of times each day.  And that's the good news.

In their article, "Social support as a predictor of variability: An examination of the adjustment trajectories of recent widows," Bisconti, Bergeman, and Boker (Psychology and Aging, Vol 21(3), September 2006, 590-599) examined the social support networks of twenty-eight recent widows.  One of the findings of the study demonstrated the moment-by-moment variations in the emotional states of the widows in the study.  George Bonnano (The Other Side of Sadness) reproduces the chart for two widows in the study.  You can see that chart here as it illustrates his point.

"Indeed," Bonnano writes, "when we look more closely at the emotional experiences of bereaved people over time, the level of fluctuation is nothing short of spectacular" (page 41).  The oscillation of emotions, he says, "is a normal part of grieving."  One of the great things about moments is that they tend to last only a moment.

There are several implications of this discussion.  First, "the most striking implication of the oscillation of mourning is that it bears to little resemblance to the conventional idea that grief unfolds in a predictable sequence of stages" (page 40).  So if you find yourself going back and forth between joy and sadness, you're not in denial or "skipping steps."  You're typical.

Second, typically we grieve in a "dual process" mode.  So if you are bereaved and you still laugh and smile and have a good time as part of your process, you are not a heartless SOB who never really cared for your dead spouse.  You should be prepared to get that response, but you don't have to own it.

Third, when you have those awful, terrible, throat-constricting, bowel-clenching, breath-stopping moments of pain, you can let the moment happen.  And then you can let it pass.  The great thing about being in the moment is that it is only a moment.  We have choices about when and whether we want to return to such moments.