The Necessary Pain of Loss

Fast forward to my junior year of high school. I was in woodshop making a piano bench. Part of the process involved drilling holes into the legs of the piano bench. I would later fill the holes with wood. It was a necessary part of connecting the side of the bench to the leg. As I was drilling, I began to imagine that I was the wood and how it must feel to get drilled into. Not only the pain of having a sharp tool pressed into you, but also losing part of yourself as it got cut away. If I were the wood, the pain of loss would have been strong.

I then realized that the entire process of making a piano bench would be painful for the wood. It begins with taking rough wood, and then cutting it to the proper lengths. Then it is cut on the table saw for width, jointed for straightness, and planed for thickness. Each step involves loss, and each step is repeated various times for different parts of the bench. Each step brought pain, but each step brought the wood closer to becoming something new.

That moment is when I also realized the beauty that followed losing my best friend to a different high school. While at that high school, he became friends with a group of people who I then became friends with. Those friendships continue to this day. If my friend had not left me, I would never have gained some of my most dear relationships and biggest life lessons in my most pivotal time of development. When my friend left me to go to a different high school, all I could feel was the pain of loss. Looking back years later, I realized how that loss helped me to become something greater.

The point of this is not to say that all loss is a good thing. Losing family members to death among other large trials does not guarantee that your life will be greater because of that loss. However, much of loss we experience in life shuts doors so that other better ones can open. Sometimes we need to be willing to let things go so that we can have the time, ability, or opportunity to be part of something greater.