grief is an altar
The quiet devotion of mourning what cannot be fixed.
Because business rarely speaks of grief—and yet most of us carry it.
There are some things you don’t get over.
You live beside them.
You answer emails beside them.
You go to meetings beside them.
You mentor new staff beside them.
You build strategies beside them.
You keep showing up beside them.
And in that space—between the living and the loss—you build something else: An altar.
Not a religious one, if that word carries too much weight.
An ancestral one. A sacred one.
Not with candles or incense—
but with presence.
With attention.
With the small, holy decision to keep sitting beside what hurts—without trying to fix it.
Holy is what holds.
What endures when performance stops.
What invites forward, not perfection.
It’s not always bright or beautiful.
Sometimes it’s broken. Quiet. Undone.
But it’s real. And it asks for reverence.
Holy is what you remember when nothing makes sense. It’s the room you make beside grief, beside wonder, beside whatever is too big to carry alone.
Holy is reverence for what life has handed you—just as it is.
Not reserved for temples.
Not earned by following rules.
Revealed by attention—and an openness to awareness.
Holy is what you meet when you stop trying to fix the world—and start listening to it.
That’s when grief wakes up.
And it’s not a detour.
It’s a rhythm. A ritual.
A routine that finds you.
Grief is a form of devotion.
Not to the pain itself—
but to the love that came before,
the love that still lives within,
and the love that endures even now—and then.
And forward?
Forward might look slower.
Softer. More vulnerable.
Grief invites you to break your own rules.
It might look like pausing before the next big initiative. Letting go of the unspoken pressure to move on. Making space in meetings to name what’s been lost. Redesigning systems to allow for solitude. For honesty. For repair.
Forward might look like leaders who don’t know what to do next—because their blind spots have entered the room before their solutions.
Like teams who tell the truth out loud, when it used to live only in corners.
Like workplaces that know how to hold complexity—without rushing to fix it.
I used to think mourning was a pit you fell into,
and the goal was to climb out.
But more often, it’s a room you return to.
Sometimes daily.
Sometimes only when it rains.
The door is always there,
sometimes the door finds you.
And walking through it—deliberately, even briefly—is its own kind of ritual.
We fear grief because it can only be honest.
And so much of the corporate world isn’t.
But this altar doesn’t ask for your sell.
It doesn’t want your spin.
It only wants your nearness.
Your truth.
Even the part you wish you could control.
Some losses never get closure.
That doesn’t mean you failed.
It means you’re on sacred ground—where tenderness matters more than answers,
and sitting—truly listening—is an act of love.
Grief isn’t the end of work.
It’s a way back to the soul of it.
So stay close.
Light the candle of your attention. And hold your grief—like the precious teacher it is. For your development. For your devotion.
For what wants to live.