My Oprah Moment.

After all the crying is done... after all the noise of the immediate, short term hurt... after the clanging and clattering of the fall... there comes a moment of silence.

A quiet part where you sit and be with what actually is. When you let the gremlin questions wash away. The "why didn't he, why couldn't I, why wasn't it, what could have been...." Where you take a breath and slowly start to dust yourself off.

Yep... there are some cuts and grazes, a few bruises here and there... but these are all things that heal. Yes... there is a little pool of sadness that sits in the pit of your stomach... but with each breath you take - every time you inhale slowly and deeply enough - that little pool of sad starts to dry.

You can't rush this. It deserves to be there. You are mourning a loss. But if you can acknowledge it, hell... make friends with it, this too... will become easier.

Only when you get to this silence can you hear the ringing in your ears stop, feel the pain in your head subside and let the small voice in your soul once again start to say... "you're ok kid... this is going to be ok."

And then... only then... can you start to realise that when something major has fallen away, you can see clearly that something remarkable has been revealed. The essence of you. The soul that can love, recover and learn, once again emerges not just intact, but more awake than before. A mask, a weight has been removed from the person you define as yourself.

As I negotiate my way through this world, moving from one challenge to another, I contantly find myself gazing down to find that somehow... my feet are still on the ground. I am still breathing, still living and still going.

And then, I get the Bhuddist joke of it all.

We are not (nor are we ever) the people we think we are. We are not locked to the thing we fear to lose. What we are, is the soul that is left when everything else is gone.

Losing what we think cannot be lost compels us to remember who we are...

"With the walls of my house burt down/I have a better view of the moon"

"Each time we mourn a loss its as if we've lost a ballast, been bounced and made more luminous."

The art of losing is hard to master. But losing yourself... your joy of being... that is the only disaster.

Sometimes you have to raise a flag, a white one, and say "Love - as incredible as it is - sometimes isn't enough. Sometimes we're just not the right fit, we're not the match we hoped we were. But that's ok. Maybe we'll fit together in a different way... some other day."

And then you look down at the pieces of your heart you swept up off the floor and you realise you've already put them back together.

No - its not exactly the same shape it was before all of this... but that's ok.

Because that is the whole point.