Last week I read Susan Piver’s beautiful writing about the importance of sadness and sighed, nodded, and cried at the same time. She was expressing exactly what I was trying to say, unsuccessfully, the other day. I wasn’t having a bad day, though several friends called me and asked if I was OK after reading the post. I don’t think I have a desperately tortured approach to the world, though perhaps others differ.
I was simply trying to describe what it’s like to be me in the world. I feel intense joy and grief in equal measure, and it is safe to say that both emotions mark every single day of my life. If the definition of a broken heart is feeling things, including sadness, overwhelmingly, then I have one. Every single day. It’s just another way of saying I’m porous.
I love, too, what Susan has to say about the instinct to turn sadness into one of the less uncomfortable emotions: bitterness, anger, helplessness. Even defensiveness can be a place to hide from sadness. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the last years for me have been a journey that is in large part about accepting my own fundamental sadness. Resisting the impulse to run from the discomfort that true sadness brings. Instead, leaning into it. This is not easy, and for sure, a lot of the time it hurts. Though there are many things that cut me to the quick, my essential sadness is time’s swift passage; that is the black hole at the center of my life, the unavoidable truth around which all the planets of my being orbit.
Virginia Woolf said “The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder” and I could not agree more. In accepting the sadness I’ve seen so much more of the joy; in acknowledging my innate broken-heartedness I’ve also learned to be open to soaring moments of inspiration and even to belly laughter.
Naomi Shihab Nye’s gorgeous Kindness addresses also the ways that sadness is inextricably linked to sweeter emotions. Her lines remind me of my thoughts about gentleness, another word that has been in my mind of late.
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth/
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
And so I supposed the message is not to shirk our own sorrow and not to bolt to safer harbors whose emotions are less painful. At least if you’re wired like me, the path is paved with sadness, but that doesn’t mean the sky isn’t filled with glory.