At some point in the year, usually in earliest May, I experience a familiar rush of joy.

Walking to work transcends the functional by becoming fabulous – in the way marching en masse, in early morning sunlight, can be.

Now, in the dying days of the year, that light is all but gone.

Your route to work may mean resisting the force of the wind threatening to blow the contents of car-clogged roads into the sea. Your internal world may feel just as unsettled.

The end of a year is a complicated hurdle, bringing with it, consciously or unconsciously, an encounter with all endings we have ever had.

We are faced with a renewed and often unwelcome connection to our vulnerability.

Loss is prevalent

The transience of life is harder to ignore as nature sets about destroying all that was created in the more luscious part of the year.

Loss is prevalent and, even as we light fires, layer up and snuggle down, another part of us may be quietly grieving some place, some dream or – perhaps most painfully of all – someone.

And yet we know there is wisdom to be gleaned from aligning with the cycle of seasons. It serves us well to be reminded that we are built for endings, even as we long for beginnings.

We are, somehow, equipped to let go of abundance and yield trustingly, perhaps even willingly, to the mini-death that is winter. What we lose leaves in its place a potentially fertile void and the opportunity to feel and appreciate what was.

Hope inherent

This complex theme of the hope inherent in loss is neatly captured in the deceptively simple lines of the Passenger song Let her go:

‘Only need the light when it’s burning low,
Only miss the sun when it starts to snow,
Only know you love her when you let her go,
Only know you’ve been high when you’re feeling low,
Only hate the road when you’re missing home,
Only know you love her when you let her go
And you let her go.’

The piece that is hopeful here, of course, is that as we let ‘her’ (as a metaphor for anything lost) go, we are learning about strength. As we navigate loss, we learn about worth. As we feel pain, we are connecting with others.

So as this year ends, let’s allow space for the losses and, in doing so, make room for the gains.