Sit still with your grief if you need to, then lift it and carry it with you. You mourn their loss because they mattered, because the world without them is diminished. When you mourn a person, it’s a form of love. For as short as life is, know it is also a container big enough to hold things you could not have imagined six months ago or six years ago. Recognize the difference between the end and an end. Start building. ĭo not turn away joy – even if it arrives at an inconvenient time, even if you think you should be grieving, even if you think it’s “too soon.” Joy is always on time. Accept that these are your materials right now. Stop staring at the materials, half believing they were delivered to you by mistake, half expecting a truck to haul them away. Think of grief, anger, worry as bricks or planks of wood. There is no merit badge for Doing All the Hard Things Alone. īe brave enough to ask for help when you need it.

Be kind – maybe something you do or say today will be the good medicine they need. Įvery person you encounter has a struggle, a hidden wound, something they carry that hurts them. Let it not be okay – and know, for now, that’s okay. Let it be messy and jerry-rigged and held together with binder clips and duct tape. Let life be a little ramshackle right now. You are not being graded, and you do not receive extra credit for being miserable 100% of the time. You are not betraying your grief by feeling joy. Give the present the gift of your full attention. Stop rewinding and replaying the past in your mind. If we’re not careful, we can revise the life right out of them. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you can polish it dull. If you’re not careful, you can scrub all the weirdness and wildness right out of it. I believe strongly in the importance of revision, but here’s something I believe just as strongly: If you’re not careful, you can revise the life right out of a piece of writing.

Any bolded emphasis is mine and I’ve added a bit of commentary within “”. Hopefully by now you know how I feel about quotes – here are some of my favourites. In terms of structure, the book is quite short and most pages contain a single quote from the author or a string of related thoughts. My summary: I really, really, really enjoyed this book. I can’t directly relate to either of these traumas, but I found the takeaways universally applicable. The author had suffered a number of devastating miscarriages and the surprising breakdown of her relationship. Keep Moving is written from a position of vulnerability. (A copy of which, fortuitously, happened to be on the shelf at my local branch how I love the library). A few weeks ago Nicole mentioned the book Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change by Maggie Smith after reading her description of the book, I immediately hopped over to my library portal and placed a hold.

Keep moving maggie