Embracing the Beauty of Impermanence: Rethinking the Notion of ‘Forever’ Following Divorce
In those dark first days of my separation, I felt it was best to just try to get through every single minute. At first, I would sit on my bed or on the floor for most of the day, trying to stay calm and pull myself together. But it wasn’t easy. Taking it one moment at a time seemed to stretch the day out into infinity, and some moments were better than others — emotions peaked and then subsided, but at least I knew that after the hard minutes there would inevitably be a few more minutes when I seemed to experience a sense of radiant calm. In the days and weeks that followed, those good minutes gradually turned into hours, then the good hours turned into days, and finally, a few months after the whole surprising challenge began, there were weeks when I felt confident and in control again, before the voice of doubt and sadness temporarily crept back in. But each time the depression and sense of failure came back it was shorter and less intense, a clear reminder to me that the healing process was underway and that what had felt like an insurmountable challenge not so long ago was now simply a fact of life that had less and less influence on the rhythm of my moods.
We have been conditioned to believe that the value of a relationship is measured by its longevity, that its success is determined…
