I know. The fish seem strange for a blog on grief, but these fish are an important symbol of our relationship with grief.

The image of a swimming fish comes from one of William Bridges books on transitions. In The Way of Transition: Embracing Life’s Most Difficult Moments, William Bridges discusses both the West and the East’s approach to loss. Here is what he says: ” The alternation of letting go of an old world and beginning a new one is the rhythmic pattern underlying life itself. … East and West have traditionally taken opposite  positions in relation to this cycle. Eastern religions have traditionally embraced the letting go the characterizes the ending aspect of the cycle…. Western thought, on the other hand, has tried to get the most out of the other aspect of the cycle - the identifications, the embodiments, the actualizations that are associated with the transistion phase of  beginning again in a new cycle.  Both East and West believe in a universal energy that…is meant to flow in a single direction. I am arguing, in contrast, that human beings…operate on a current where the energy “alternates” between ending and beginning, and where stopping at either pole is dangerous. The pattern of experience and nature that alternates endings and beginnings results in a type of fishtailing movement, an undulation between letting go and taking hold again in which each is affirmed in time and in which the movement between them, like the back and forth sweep of a fish’s tail, is the force that carries us forward in our lives. It is the readiness to go back into transition again when the old reality is wearing out that provides us with the force that propels us through life.” 

That folks, is a powerful way of understanding the world.  Every time I read that passage, its clarity stops me in my tracks. Those fish remind me that all is well in the cycle of life and I, too, swim like a fish.