Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Necessary Losses: the Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

Maria Popova’s meditation on Judith Viorst’s Necessary Losses offers something quietly radical: the idea that loss is not the opposite of a full life, but its very architecture. Viorst maps the full terrain of what humans relinquish — “not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on” — revealing how each surrender, chosen or imposed, carves us more precisely into who we are. Like a sculpture shaped by what is chiseled away, the self is formed not only by what it accumulates but by what it releases. Popova extends this further, suggesting that all human creativity — every poem, every telescope aimed at the dark — is a response to the knowledge that we will one day lose everything we love. There is something both sobering and strangely freeing in that: to grieve well, to let go with intention, turns out to be one of the most distinctly human things we can do.

Be The Change

Think of one thing you’ve lost, such as a relationship, a version of yourself, or a dream you quietly set down. Sit with this loss for just a few minutes today, and invite yourself to reflect on what this loss unearthed or gave to you. Perhaps finish the sentence: “I lost _______, and in losing it, I became …”