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Query: "Grieving" vs "Letting Go"
A blogpost in the works is something like "Grieving/Letting-Go effectively is a key coordination skill."
i.e. when negotiating with other humans, it will often (way more often than you wish) be necessary to give up a thing that are important to you.
Sometimes this is "the idea that we have some particular relationship that you thought we had."
Sometimes it will be "my pet project that's really important to me."
Sometimes it's "the idea that justice can be served in this particular instance."
A key skill is applying something Serenity-Prayer-Like. "May I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Your attachment to a given thing is often doing useful work, because, well, the thing is actually important. And sometimes that thing is worth fighting for, and sometimes you need to let it go, and sometimes you need to let a particular piece of it go, but it's remember why the thing matters so you can still fight for it later.
My question here is "is the better term here 'let go', or 'grieve'?"
I've been using the word grieve, largely because of this post. I think the process of letting go of special things is often grief-shaped. You keep expecting things to be a particular way, and facing the fact that they can no longer (or never were) that way is painful, and it requires both time and some skills to process that.
This is somewhat a stretch of what most people mean by the word "grief", but I think it's appropriate.
That said, a key goal of mine right now is to have a good, scalable coordination framework. And using nonstandard definitions is costly for scalability. You can do it once or twice, but if you're doing it all the time you're building up an impenetrable wall of jargon. Is this Common or Expert level jargon?
"Letting go" doesn't capture everything important, or communicate the magnitude of how hard the skill is, but it is a phrase I expect more people to know, and might be close enough.
Yeah.
I think my preferred group level solution is to have some people around who do ruthlessness and some who do grieving (with accompanying broader strategies) who keep each other in check.