Sadness is a gift. I often feel gratitude for the gift of sadness.
Many times, I’ve written about how I use anger to defend against other emotions. Anger makes me feel powerful, agentic – like there’s something I can do about (or to!) a thing or person. So many other emotions – sadness, fear, shame – end pretty much where they start in a Mobius loop of passive self-reinforcement. What’s a sad person to do, other than to listen to sad music? [Note: when I first thought of writing this post, I wondered, “Who has written about the idea of sadness as a gift?” I did some Googling, and I found that, basically, no one has. Except an artist I never heard of previously named Adrianne Lenker, who wrote this super-pretty, super-sad song. And when, a day or three later, I had a conversation with my son about his sadness, I mentioned this idea, the idea of sadness as a gift, and he said, “Yeah! Like Adrianne Lenker sings about!” Kid’s cooler than I am.]
What can I do when feeling shame other than hide my face? What can I do when I’m scared other than cower, fight, or flee? None of which actions leads anywhere other than back to fear.
Sadness, though – I’ve been thinking about it a lot in recent days (months, years). Sometimes I joke that sadness is my superpower. Although I have, at times, suffered from depression, I’ve been pretty fortunate, in that my depressive episodes have been minor and brief. Sadness, though? I feel it daily. Powerfully. I cry at the drop of a hat. At movies and books. At stories my friends tell me. At things I see on the street. And yes, at things in my own life.
I don’t think I cried from the age of eleven or twelve until I was well into my forties. In my forties, though, the tears began to flow, and not a day has passed since that I haven’t felt grateful for those tears, for the gift of which they serve as evidence. It is, truly, a gift that sadness courses through me like a river. The sadness, today, feels to me as much like a wellspring as like anything else.
The Buddha said “life is dukkha,” which is often translated as “suffering.” My understanding is that the Pali word dukkha actually means something more like “unsatisfactoriness,” or “unease.” Regardless, the Buddha was onto something. Life is – at least mine is – filled with “unsatisfactoriness.” At times, sure, it’s also filled with whatever the opposite to that is. But pleasure, satisfaction, joy – those lack the constancy and ubiquity of unsatisfactoriness that inevitably flows from the simple fact that I’m a person, separate from the rest of the world, lacking omnipotence. And that separation – of my will, my wishes, my preferences – from the rest of the world, that’s where loss lies, and where sadness begins.
For me, feeling that sadness in its fullness? It makes me whole.