This week the final episode of This Is Us will air. For those who watched the series, we learned about love, loss, parenting, grief, shame, trauma, and how to deal with losing a loved one, among many other invaluable lessons.
It was sometimes hard to watch, and often heavy, but in the end This Is Us is all of us.
As Rebecca takes her final journey, she mentions that it seems sad and William says to her, “The way I see it, if something makes you sad when it ends, it must have been pretty wonderful when it was happening. Truth be told, I always felt it a bit lazy to just think of the world as sad, because so much of it is. Because everything ends. Everything dies. But if you step back, if you step back and look at the whole picture, if you’re brave enough to allow yourself the gift of a really wide perspective, if you do that, you’ll see that the end is not sad, Rebecca. It’s just the start of the next incredibly beautiful thing.”
The start of the next incredibly beautiful thing. What a wonderful outlook.
As author Joseph Campbell wrote, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
The rapture of being alive. It can be hard to embrace when we are thinking about past mistakes or worrying about future upsets. But those things that make us cry when they are over are the things that make life worth living. They are not always easy, but they are always worth it.
May we embrace the perfectly imperfect journey of our life. As singer Leonard Cohen said, “This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can… reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.'”