When Grief Cracks the Window: Belief, Sorrow, and Seeing Anew

There’s a moment in grief when the world tilts. The air feels thicker. Time stretches and folds. You realize that everything you once believed about how life works has changed. Grief has a way of turning us toward questions that can’t be answered and truths that can’t be undone.  Pain shows up.  Disillusionment surfaces.  Disorientation lands.

Wayne Dyer once said, “You’ll see it when you believe it.” At first, those words feel almost impossible inside loss. How can belief come before sight when your world has been rearranged by absence? Yet over time, grief teaches us that belief is not blind optimism. It’s the willingness to trust that meaning still exists — even in the unexplainable.

What’s Written on the Window

Hyrum W. Smith — author, teacher, and founder of FranklinCovey — developed a model he called the Belief Window, the idea that our behavior is based on what we believe to be true, even if those beliefs are inaccurate. Each of us lives behind our own window of belief, formed by experience, family, culture, and the stories we’ve told ourselves about what life should be.

When grief enters, that window cracks.Beliefs like “Good things happen to good people” or “Love protects us from loss” no longer hold. We start to see the world differently — not because life suddenly changed its rules, but because our understanding of those rules has changed, our awareness awakened.

In grief, we are invited to reexamine what’s written on the glass. Some words need to fade. Others need to be rewritten or redefined. We may find that strength isn’t about holding it together, but about allowing ourselves to unravel. That love isn’t lost, only transformed. That endings are never as final as they appear.  That love goes on forever.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, author Francis Weller writes, “Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss, and no loss that is not a reminder of the depth of our love.”

To live at that wild edge — between what has been and what remains — is to walk through a sacred threshold. It’s raw and untamed. It’s where the stories we once believed begin to dissolve, and something more spacious takes root. This is where we begin to see not only what was lost, but what remains: connection, memory, spirit, presence.  Upon that wild edge we dance in circle together, connect through community and remember in ritual.  We have to.  Otherwise, the weight of this world is too much to bear.  Grief is its own ritual. 

The Power of Belief

Belief can become a bridge between sorrow and renewal.  When we believe that love endures, that growth can emerge from pain, that life is both fragile and eternal — we begin to see the world differently. The cracked window doesn’t block the light anymore; it refracts it, scattering beauty in unexpected directions, creating rainbows of promise.

Wayne Dyer said that when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. Perhaps grief is the deepest practice of that truth. We don’t look away from the pain; we learn to see through it — to the love that shaped it, to the meaning that can still unfold.  We see because we believed.

Root to Rise

Grief, like a storm, shakes loose what is barely hanging on. It humbles and remakes us. It roots us deeper into what matters — presence, tenderness, truth. And it invites us to rise again, seeing not through a polished pane of certainty but through a window that lets the sacred shine through the cracks.

Maybe belief isn’t about knowing. Maybe it’s about trusting — that in the breaking open, we are being made whole.

“What beliefs are being rewritten through your sorrow? What light might be coming through your cracks?”

-       Sending love and light from KRH at The Human Coach, because being human is wild.

Light filtered through the cracked glass of our beliefs transforms into color and meaning