Graduation: The Glee and the Grief
Life Passages are all crossroads. Crossroads are a place where one choice ends and another begins, a fork in the road of life’s journey.
One of life passages is graduation from the academic world; where the student uses all the knowledge accumulated thus far, and puts it to use as they set off into the journey of their own life out of the walls of predictability and security and into the world of risk taking and even more choices. It is a journey into responsibility.
One always thinks graduation is all about joy and celebration. But for every life passage there is a loss and a death of a way of being too. Graduation has it’s loss and ending. It has a mini-death. We have all felt it. We have felt it when a school year has ended and summer is upon us. There is the call of excitement beckoning us forward and at the same time the yearning for the safety and certainty of home, the known and what comes next. It is a time of choosing. And with that choosing one choice dies. What is dying is the closeness of home.
Choices that in some way severe the closeness of the bond of familiarity have a price and consequence. After the choice is made, there is no going home. Graduation severs that feeling of home. It oftentimes is the ending of innocence, irresponsibility, dependence and the luxury of defining the world through the eyes of ‘me’ and only ‘me’. It is a venture into the world of ‘us’.
DrAvivaBoxer.com is an online authority on end of life education, products and services that go beyond grief and loss into the pinnacle moment of passing. Graduation, in all it’s glory has joy, but it also has a mini-death. A choice not taken is a death of that choice. DrAvivaBoxer.com knows about death and dying. DrAvivaBoxer.com educates us on how to use the choices not taken and put them together like a puzzle to see just what is our everyday legacy? What is the legacy that is the essence and architecture of our lives?
At every life passage it is time to take inventory of that legacy, whether 9 years old, 18 years old, or 82 years old. A good time to summarize a life is at life passages, not just at death in a eulogy for the deceased. Because the death of childhood innocence, of dependence, is a perfect time to symbolize an everyday relic of life lived thus far. Not a pen, or a cap and gown tassel, or a diploma. That is what is important to the world. But what is important to the soul? Was it traversing the labyrinth of friendship? Was it finding a gift or skill that creates a passion? Was it the defining of oneself apart from family and community? Was it about communication and expression? If so, what is the symbol of you infused into the important experience of academia?
If you were a singer, was it the fact that you learned to express feeling through your voice so you could lead others to feel as well? If you were a writer, did you find the way words can trap you as well as free you from beliefs and ideas? If you were a craftsman, did you find that the object needing your skill had its own obstacles that caused you to yield to it’s limitations, so much so that it felt human?
From where you stand at a life’s passage, can you find a symbol that best reflects the experience of who you are thus far? Can you capture it?
Imagine being 82 yrs old with 6 tokens, relics or symbols that have represented you at all of life’s passages. Not the universal symbols like a wedding ring, a college ring, a hospital identification bracelet or a key to a home. No, something much more personal and relevant to your own growth. Those symbols of life passage define the life that you live. It is the tools in your’ life medicine pouch’ that you take everywhere you go. Imagine your loved ones opening that pouch once you’ve passed and symbolically know what you found important in life. And in so doing you can help to catapult them forward in their own lives with the insight you have garnered from your own experiences and wisdom.
Mini-deaths are life’s report card with a place for comments. They are celebrations and losses in the same moment. They are life passages. They are growth spurts. They are the time to take inventory and appreciate the courage it takes to live our own soul fully.
DrAvivaBoxer.com takes all the flesh off of the body of our lives to reveal the bones of the structure of who we are and what has been, as well as the most important things to us in our life. Wander through the website, DrAvivaBoxer.com, online authority for end of life education, products and services that go beyond loss and grief through the pinnacle moment of passage. You just might find how to move effortlessly and gracefully through the mini-deaths, and thus gain strength and fortitude at the final moment in life passages enabling you to cartwheel across the pinnacle portal of passing.
