Sometimes, we don't realise what we've lost until we get the chance to regain something we've lost.
I know it's an old romantic music cliche of don't know what you've lost till it's gone, but sometimes it goes, and life carries on, and then all of a sudden, somebody shows you a pathway back to where you were before, and then your heart breaks and you realise how important that thing you lost was.
Only you lost it so slowly, so insipidly or in the midst of such other turmoil or stress or upheaval that you never noticed, and then you did. Then you realised that you had a chance to retrieve something which was so precious to you, so vital to the way you felt about yourself or the world, that you wanted to go after it again.
I remember various periods of my life where this happened; various periods when I turned around and I wasn't good enough anymore because I'd let things slip or I'd let a relationship get out of hand that I really should have paid more attention to or I nearly lost my house because I took a gamble to try and build a practice, which at that stage felt like a monument to myself and for nothing else.
So the skill here, the lesson is to take a little bit of time to realise what you've got now, what you haven't yet lost, but you could, in pursuit of something else, that just might not be as good and to hang on to the things which ultimately would be the first things to go to if the house was on fire and you could only save a handful of objects or pastimes or health characteristics or relationships or whatever else you think may be important to you when you suddenly realised they were gone, but you had an opportunity to not have lost them in the first place.
Blog Post Number - 4069