Each summer throughout my life, my family and I would rent cabins along a beautiful lake in northern Michigan for a summer vacation away from the city. A yearly highlight would include a hike through our favorite wooded park together to take in the peace and quiet of nature not easily found in our urban Detroit neighborhood. There was a sense of familiarity, comfort, safety, and security in this park, trusting that it would be there for us each year to grant us a sense of serenity and an ability to be nostalgic as we grew older.
In 2020, when it felt like our sense of safety was already being threatened by all the instability that came with the covid-19 pandemic, I was eager to escape to the security of nature in my happy place. Only I was devastated to find that the wooded park path I knew, loved, and depended upon my entire life had been demolished. The beautiful, red pine trees that canopied the trail had all been chopped down, removing most of the beauty and magic that had provided so much calm and serenity.
My initial reaction was anger. During the year that the world seemed to be crashing and burning to the ground and we were forced to be homebound and isolated from others, the state had now removed one of the few remaining things that felt stable and reliable to me. I was pissed! And for the remainder of our trip, I was unable to even drive by the park without feeling a sense of grief and anger. I continued to feel bitter about it for many months.
Two years later, I bought a bike and brought it up to the lake with me. If I couldn’t hike at the park anymore, I would ride my bike around the perimeter of the lake instead. As I rode my bike along the dirt roads that lined the lake, I passed by the park. Curious, I decided to ride my bike along the trail that we used to hike to see what was left of it. I felt myself giving massive side-eye as I rode past all the stumps and remnants of trees along the trail. And then I came to a fork in the path. Since we had been on foot before all these years, we had always taken the trail to the right which led back to the start of the trailhead since taking the trail to the left would go further into the woods, longer than we had time for when walking along the trail by foot. However, since I was biking, I decided to take the trail to the left this time, knowing that I could get through it much faster on wheels to not take up too much of the day.
After riding for around five minutes, I reached the end of the demolished trees and the path veered back into woods again. Suddenly, I discovered a whole new hidden world that I had never known despite coming to this park all my life. Tall, magnificent pine trees shaded me from the harsh sun rays and then a meadow with beautiful wildflowers around the next bend.
In that moment, I recognized a powerful lesson. Life is impermanent. Everything that we have we may lose one day. Including this special park that I had relied on for so long. And we can choose to remain bitter and jaded about the losses, stuck in our pain and anger. Or being paralyzed by anticipatory anxiety around when our beloved park will one day get torn down. But being able to accept that loss and grieve it can then open up the opportunity to find new beautiful and unexpected things. Had I remained stuck in my grief, I could have stayed bitter about the loss of my park trail forever. But after facing my grief, letting it go, and venturing down a new path, the world suddenly opened up more, providing me with a different, but still beautiful, experience to behold. And had I never lost the path I once loved and clung to only what was comfortable and familiar, I never would have chosen to venture deeper to discover that an exciting new world existed just around the corner.