How to Find Meaning in Loss (Even When It Feels Impossible)

(shaker shaking) (mouse clicking) (light music) Headspace Studio. (light music) Hey friends, it's Rosie here. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Friday. A few nights ago, I was sitting on our front porch with Tori, looking at the sky, thinking about everything that's happened, and I asked him, "Do you think there's any reason for this, any meaning to all of this loss?" And he sat there for a long time before saying, "I don't know." We've spent this week talking about loss, about the shock of it, the grief, the slow process of rebuilding. But today I wanna talk about something that comes much later, the question that lingers after the dust settles. How do we find meaning in whatever we've been through? After he said that, it really stuck with me. I began to think how meaning sometimes involves us making a choice. Meaning isn't something we find, it's something we make, right? We can go 30 days without food, three days without water, and about 30 seconds before attaching meaning to something. It's just how we're wired. We take the broken pieces, the things we never asked for, and we decide what to do with them. My olita knew this well. She'd always tell me. (Rosie speaking in foreign language) When life breaks you, you decide whether to stay in pieces or to keep moving forward. (chuckling) And wow, if that isn't the truth, I think I've always been this way. Someone who asks big questions, maybe it's because I spent so much time with the neighborhood Diaz and Abuelas growing up in East LA. My grandmother was my main caretaker, and she lived a life. She had this incredible way of weaving her hardest experiences into these stories that somehow always ended with a lesson, a piece of wisdom. She'd tell me about growing up in Mexico, about raising herself and her siblings, about survival. But she never told those stories with bitterness. She was made of iron. Even when she spoke about suffering, she always found a way to make sense of it. I didn't realize it at the time, but she was teaching me how to find meaning in loss. She never sugarcoated how hard life could be. She told it like it was. And while I'm not sure her approach would make the cut for gentle parenting, I can't deny that they shaped me. They built my resilience, my perspective and the way I navigate hardship today. I think about this a lot with my own grief, not just from losing people, but losing stability, certainty, the plans I thought that were set. When I lost my job, it wasn't just about the paycheck or the title, it was about identity, about security. At the time, it felt like I had failed, like something had been taken from me. But looking back, I can see how that loss forced me to create something new. It pushed me to focus on work that actually mattered...