10 June 2020 | Sadness
Originally published on Wordpress
10 June 2020
One Quote
He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach.
By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone.
By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness.I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself.
Or convince others — the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad.
Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all.And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the mid afternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
I don’t have much to add to this quote — but a lot of people around us are sad (and not depressed, that is an abyss and should be given a lot of priority — because it’s difficult to get out of it — and not totally healthy to ignore it — except if your ‘busy’ness is therapeutic).
I personally know that feeling, and it sucks big time — it really is a ‘physical’ sort of mental pain which pinches you constantly or punches you in the gut — when you are up in the middle of the night thinking about life and some facts that you’ve suddenly became aware of. You clearly see all the life events of your closest ones you’re missing out on right now, and as the movie reel of all the people who are no longer close to you or you’re not their confidants anymore — you start envisioning a parallel universe where you relive all of the good times that will probably never happen again in your life. There will always be people who meant the world to you and now have forgotten about you forever (or you’re simply a 16x16 pixel on a 7 inch screen of their phones permanently now at best), and you get this awful feeling called sadness mixed in a cocktail with oodles of loneliness and a pint of nostalgia.
Let’s spend some time focussing on our ‘gham’ / ‘dukh’ / ‘sadness’ and then move on. :)
One Song
I was going to post an Arijit Singh song. But that is sadness of the romantic kind. And you already have your own favourite go-to sad song.
So probably something from Disney — as they get some basic emotions really right. I loved this movie. It flipped / subverted many expectations from a typical Disney fairy tale.
I think there are lots of kinds of love. And we focus too much on sadness from some forms — while the others patiently and kindly wait for us. Rather than expecting a knight in shining armour, I think we might find our happy endings by forgiving our siblings and best friends and making peace with our parents and our childhood scars.
I loved how ‘sadness’ is an essential part of life was depicted brilliantly in another Disney movie.
One movie scene
By the way, like I mentioned, Disney does get a lot of nuances and very small, almost unnoticeable facts perfect to the ‘T’.
Just off the top of my head, in ‘Finding Nemo’ — showing a fish with a receding hairline was a unique way of differentiating between young and old fish (how in the world would we know otherwise!)
In one of my favouritestest movies, I noticed on the umpteenth re-viewing — ‘Joy’ is the only emotion who doesn’t cast a shadow. She’s literally a source of light. Tons of insights in that movie on what goes on inside our brain. (But that’s another blog post!)
If you haven’t seen the movie yet, do watch it! But I learnt this too late in life — ‘Sadness’ gives our core memories the complexity and depth that is crucial to overall emotional development and maturity in life. Childhood is a phase we must grow out of to be able to appreciate ‘Joy’ more fully. Just like there can’t be true despair without hope, there can be no pure joy without having experienced true sadness at some point of time in our life.
More than sadness, always chase ‘truth’ — else our core memories will be damaged beyond repair if we keep repressing negative moments or pretend that we’re not sad. Don’t live a life of fear and anxiety, instead, learn how to cope with the grief!
