Navigating Colective Grief

We are living through something never before seen. A collective grief. A strange and quiet mourning, unfolding in layers. We do not grieve for a single thing, but for many. For the world that was, for the ordinary days that once seemed unremarkable. For the rhythm we had without knowing it was a rhythm. Something has shifted, and we feel it in the body. The loss of normality. The fear of what will become of us. The vanishing thread of social connection. It presses against us, all at once, an invisible weight.

And there is a grief that is not yet grief, but already lingers in the air. Anticipatory grief. That sensation of standing at the edge of something vast and uncertain, trying to see what lies ahead, but only meeting fog. It is the grief of what might be, the whisper of a loss that has not yet happened but is already mourned. Usually, it is tied to death. A doctor utters an unspeakable diagnosis, and time fractures. Or, on a quiet afternoon, an ordinary thought slips in: one day, I will lose my parents. One day. Not today. But still, the heart clenches.

Yet, anticipatory grief is not only about people. It is about futures imagined, half-built in the mind. A council worker, employed without a permanent contract, feels it in the months before an election. A waiting. A knowing without knowing. Will I stay? Will I go? The ground beneath them, suddenly unstable. And that is what we are all feeling now. The ground shifting. The sense that nothing is fixed, that nothing is safe. That the virus will not stop while we wait for the vaccines to arrive.

But grief — grief that does not yet belong to us — turns into something else. Anxiety. The mind, left unchecked, runs ahead, building shadows where there is only air. It paints the worst possibilities and calls them truth. It is a trick, you see. A trick of time. The mind dragging us forward when all we have, in truth, is this: now.

So how do we return? How do we step out of the fog and place our feet back on solid ground? Look around you. Name five things you see. A tablet. A chair. A high table. A painting on the wall. A phone, its battery filling with quiet energy. Simple things. Things that exist, here, now. Breathe. And see. Nothing has happened yet. You are here. In this moment, you are safe.

Let go of what you cannot hold. You cannot control what your neighbours do. You cannot control the wind or the tide. But you can stand two metres apart. You can wear a mask. You can wash your hands. You can live, one breath at a time.

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