POV: You're Ending Rumination
The key to ending rumination is not to quiet your thoughts or to feel your feelings, but to add in equally compelling counter-narratives and contrary thoughts.
Experiment with believing at least three versions of what is happening.
The key is not to arrive at a "true" projection of what's happening, what's going on for the other person, or what to do about it, the key is to arrive at knowing you don't know what might be true.
The key is to see that the evidence can compellingly endorse many perspectives, and as you try each one on, you might find you feel differently, or you might find you DON’T feel differently. Either of these can indicate that you are dealing with an existential rather than circumstantial grief.
Finding the veracity of multiple points of view is what it means to actively maintain your own presence in the unknown. This is a strategy for managing the tension of distance and time away from loved ones, for truly respecting and honoring their sovereign interior experience about which I can know very little. Every judgment I make about a loved one is a roadblock to them showing me who they really are.
Anyone can passively not know, the true key to curiosity, to wisdom, to intimacy, is to actively not know, to cultivate a relationship with the understanding of all you do not and cannot know.
As I have cultivated this practice, my judgments automatically reform, reshape, and drop themselves away, creating a spaciousness in my field where people feel free to show me who they are, to surprise me. It surprises them, how good it feels, how free they feel, and sometimes their expression surprises us both.
