If you lost someone this year you may be feeling quite lost, mixed in a cloudy grey mass of pain and sorrow.

If you lost someone this year you may spend extensive time contemplating the delicacy of mortality as part of the human condition.

If you lost someone this year you may be feeling a gap in your heart where their love once resided. You may miss their voice, hearing them laugh, even miss when you would fight. When you lose someone close to you, you lose a part of yourself. You constantly ache for their presence and you realize how much time you really spent with them. Because now that time is filled with nothingness, loneliness.

Wounds heal with time, as they say. Although a year feels like nothing. And it’s sad to think that as you heal and go through your life, thats just more time gone by without them.

I think that if you lost someone this year you should not lose faith. Whatever you believe in be it God, the universe, Allah, or science among other institutions, know that you are still in the hands of a higher purpose. There is more for you, yet.

It would be easy to numb it all, experience neither the pain nor the pleasures of this world. It would be easy to become void. To wash away into nothingness is not a solution, but rather a temporary state of self defense. Nonetheless, there is no beauty or passion or drive in that. Beauty is a discoverable feature of this world and only when you agree to subject yourself to the trials of such a hunt, verdicts both positive and negative, will you be able to find it.

It’s critical to remind yourself in times of darkness that life is in a constant flux, up and down but rarely still. To move forward seems daunting, especially without that incredibly special person by your side. But your life is your own and it is what you make it. The people in your life build you up and its hard to remember how to stand without them. But their loving memory and the courageous strength you bare deep in your gut will always be with you; it will always lift you up again. We all have it inside of us and day by day you will discover more and more just how strong you really are. And with that I will leave you with this quote,

“Change is the essence of life; be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.”

-Reinhold Niebuhr