The best time might be now.  Maybe something in your life just isn’t going to happen.  You set your heart on something but it’s not to be.  You keep hoping for something but the door has closed.  You feel some regret like an ache in your soul.  Or something has been taken from you forever.*

To mourn is Human; to mourn makes us more Human.  Not to mourn, holds us to a past we cannot change and away from a future we can.

If being open to the poverty of our lives opens our mind, to mourn opens our heart.

In the movie Elizabethtown, the main character Drew Baylor (played by Orlando Bloom) is given five minutes to mourn for the disaster of a running shoe he designed, so that he might take hold of the rest of his life.**

To mourn is to to be fully open to the truth of the present – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  It is the worst and the best of places.  When we mourn, we do not hide or close up on ourselves.  But when we do, strangely, we come to a place of wholeness and comfort.  We then let go of a past we cannot have over again that we might be free to take hold of a future we can – but have been blind to.

Help people to mourn for who and what they cannot be, so they might take hold and celebrate who and what they can be.

‘Through mourning we can reach a place where the past
remains the past and no longer contaminates the present.’

(*Most of all, I’m thinking of the serious and longed for things we’ve not been able to do with our lives, the opportunities we so hoped for.  I do not trivialise the meaning of mourning.)
(**I love illustrating from cheesy movies.  How on earth could one person be blamed for the failure of a shoe from design to production?   But then, there wouldn’t be any film if it got scrubbed in a meeting of the design team.  The film does have a stonking soundtrack.)