Of Diversion

I was once employed in comforting a lady in genuine and most violent grief. Most of the consolations that are offered in such cases are either hard and impertinent, or else tender and effeminate. To tell a woman who has lost her son that she should be consoled because he is now in a better place is to tell her what she knows and does not feel. To weep with her is to add to the fire that consumes her. I found it better to draw her, by degrees, into the company of other thoughts — not by force, but by gentle redirection.

The wisest human counsels, in regard to grief, are those which are founded on diversion and distraction. We cannot take grief by the throat and strangle it; it will slip through our hands and return stronger. But if we can shift the eye — if we can give the mind something else to look at, something that commands attention without asking too much — grief does not leave, but it loosens its grip. And loosened, it may in time fall away altogether.

Distraction is not a cure for sorrow, but it is the best of the remedies that lie close at hand.

I have seen men try to fight their grief directly, confronting it at every turn, measuring it, arguing with it, resolving that it shall not master them — and these are the men who are most thoroughly mastered by it. The grief feeds on the attention. What starves it is a lively concern with other matters: a journey, a building project, a new passion, the demands of work or friendship. I do not say this is heroic. It is not. But most of us are not heroes, and we need remedies suited to what we are.

The great Pericles, when his friend reproached him for not showing sufficient grief at his son’s death, put on a garland and went to the assembly. I have always admired this. He knew that his grief was real, and that it would be there when the assembly was over; but he also knew that the city needed him, and that there are seasons in a man’s life when he must choose, not between grief and indifference, but between grief and duty. Diversion, in its finest form, is simply this: the discipline of turning toward life.