Digging In

by Loretta Nyhan

“Pick a few things you don’t want to let slide, and let the rest sort itself out,” he said gently after one particularly rough day. “When someone leaves this world, everything else gets jostled because of the empty space. You’re gonna land in the wrong spot for a while. Sooner or later, you’ll find where you fit again.”

Death was final, but grief wasn’t; it was a dirty street fighter who rose again and again even when I thought I had successfully knocked it to the ground.

matter. Everything can be learned, you know? Some people learn sooner, others later. Not a big deal if the outcome is the same.”

I hadn’t seen him this happy in a long time. He looked alive. He didn’t look like Jesse. He didn’t look like me. He looked free. Really, truly free.

Maybe freedom had nothing to do with loss. Maybe it had everything to do with joy.

Jesse didn’t like to get dirty. I didn’t either, but for him, staying clean was a near obsession. It didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out why Jesse had such an abhorrence of dirt; it merely took a glance at a few old photographs of the apartment he grew up in. The hodgepodge of relatives crammed into it had little time for keeping tidy. Jesse’s tiny room—narrow twin bed made with military precision, scratched dresser without a speck of dust, books shelved in alphabetical order—was an oasis of calm in a sea of chaos.

“The part that wants to build something meaningful.” “That’s the heart,” Mykia said. “You had a heartshift.”

“It’s the kind that pulls you by the hair. The unexpected jolt. It’s merciless, and it doesn’t allow you to change cell by cell, cushioning the blow with time. It smacks you into a new reality. It forces you to examine things you’d rather leave under a rock.”

“I was thinking about what you said about change. I thought about when I left dental school, and at first I felt I’d experienced the quick change you spoke of. But that wasn’t right. I’d been slowly moving in this direction since I was a teenager. I just didn’t notice. Isn’t it possible that you didn’t change overnight either? That your garden is something you’ve been moving toward for a long time?”

So your idea fails. What now? Some will worry, some will give up, and some will keep pushing the dying idea until it is a lifeless, floppy mess. None of these will help. What will help is forgetting. Forget the concept of success, at least temporarily. Forget the failure. Forget the stress and the disappointment. Don’t analyze what went wrong. Don’t flog a dead horse. Forget it all so you can be reborn. A clean slate. No ideas ever existed before this very moment. Free yourself from the pressure of success, and you’ll free yourself of the oppressiveness of failure.

Raising a teenager was one long battle for power—the parent was losing it but fiercely trying to hold on, and the teen was taking advantage every time a weak spot was revealed, fighting to gain more ground.

“When you give something meaning, it’s worth remembering. We filter out the stuff that doesn’t touch our heart.”

How would I get meaning from it if I bought into the notion that shit just happened, and I had to buck up and accept it? Maybe life just unfolded like those ash snakes on the Fourth of July—messy and moving in unpredictable directions, sometimes longer and sometimes snuffing out before things really got started. If that were so, where would I find meaning in something that was so fundamentally unfair? By living as if what I did while I was on the planet did have meaning, even if I secretly feared it was all one big nothing.

success is increased opportunity. So explore. Take educated risks. Stride confidently into the unknown. But . . . make choices with the long-term health of your organization in mind.