Practice Resurrection
I woke up a couple Saturdays ago with the words 'practice resurrection' already in my mind as if waiting for me to wake to consider them. This kind of thing has never happened to me before, so it got my attention.
I love the idea of resurrections with all of their inspiring potentials and implied perseverance. Considering what it would mean to practice resurrection, I realized that for one to practice resurrection–bringing something back to life or back into one's awareness–things have to have gone a little sideways; usually, something dies.
I'm using death in the broadest sense to include all types of endings, including the death of ideas or dreams, the end of a project, relationship, life, era, or any failure or brokenness that leads us to experience a feeling of loss.
Starting a business, especially a restaurant has proved fertile ground for practicing resurrection. We have discovered and navigated what are, at times, sizable gaps between what we thought this would be like and what it is. Those discoveries have been delightful at times and, on occasion, devastating.
When things don't go how we thought they would, we can feel like we're living a life, not of our choosing, leaving us feeling trapped or stuck. We can get a little testy when this happens. Some of us blame other people or things for our situation. Others, myself included, do something a bit more private–we beat the crap out of ourselves, aggressively and thoroughly.
Both behaviors are us scrambling to find an easy way out, frantically seeking a place that feels like higher ground, where we have some control. The downside is that blaming ourselves or others keeps us from experiencing feelings of loss, fear, or disappointment. The space of blame and doubt seems safer, but it taxes us to operate on top of all that distress. Yes, it is as tiring as it sounds.
As uncomfortable as endings can be, when we're willing to surrender and let go rather than struggle against them, we can discover some newfound space–room for something else to happen. Sometimes, reckoning with defeat even creates space for you to see that you're losing at a game you didn't want to play in the first place, grinding away at something you don't even want.
I've discovered enough new space recently that I am writing from France. Michael and I are exploring a couple of places that have long called to us (the Pyrenees and the Jura), meeting with a few winemakers we've long admired, and remembering who we are outside of our business.
As a business, we've been letting go of the things that don't feel like they suit us anymore (our old website, the grill!), refining the bits we'd like to keep around, and figuring out what we want to put in our newfound space.
The four steps for practicing resurrection:
Experience a death or loss
Feel your feelings about the death or loss
Identify what it is that you are grieving and name what you miss/want/want back*
Begin
*Know that you can't go "back" to the way anything used to be. It's over. If reading this knocks you out, maybe repeat Step 2.
