Sometimes I am very sad. I think about how difficult life is, and sadness envelops me. There are climate change and our inability to deal with it as quickly as may be needed; extreme weather and flooding and fires; the warming of the oceans and the loss of species; plastic and other dangerous, indestructible waste; more than forty active wars and, especially for me, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine; worldwide homelessness and hunger; our sharp and nasty political divisions in the U.S.; the many dictators holding countries hostage; the threats to democracy; cancer; heart problems; rheumatoid arthritis; blindness; deafness; Covid; influenza; RSV.; polio; a million other illnesses; people’s inability to get along; their rudeness and downright cruelty; aging, injuries, and death, and a painful childhood. There’s a lot to be sad about.
Why would I begin by listing some of the many things that sadden me? I assure you that despite this long list and the implication that there are many more examples that I might add to it, I am not depressed. I love life and have many joys. This sadness I feel now and then is like the background music of my life. It is often there even when I feel great joy. I suspect that I am not alone in this. Sadness is a common experience, and I would bet that if you look closely at your moods, you would sometimes find that sorrow even accompanies your joy. I’ve thought a lot about why this is so, why I find myself crying when I feel intense joy, for instance, and have come to believe that it’s because I know each moment is ephemeral—quickly passing. Of course, the reverse is true. When I am sad, it is because of the joy that might be, but isn’t, for example, a world with clean air and water where people are not caught up in heartless conflict. In my youth, the Earth was relatively unpolluted, and there were many more wild areas. As an adult I have surrounded myself with caring people. So I know or imagine how it could have been or could be and am sad that it is not.
But how can we not be overwhelmed by all the sorrow, by all the pain of life—that caused by human failings like war and plastic and that which is just a part of life like aging and death? Indeed, how can deeply experiencing sorrow change our lives in beneficial ways?
First, we have to accept sorrow as a part of life. As Jane Hirshfield says in her poem:
It was like this:you were happy, then you were sad,then happy again, then not.
It went on.
She is describing life, any life, our lives. We alternate between periods of happiness and sadness because life sometimes offers what we like, what is pleasant, and sometimes offers what we don’t like, what is unpleasant.
Unfortunately, we often try to to push away our sadness. We don’t want it, so we try to distract ourselves and ignore it. We do what we can to cheer up—be happy. We go for a walk, watch a funny movie, or reach for a beer. Or sometimes we play the blame game We tell ourselves a story about how we are a victim, making others responsible for our pain. We often blame our parents for what’s wrong in out lives. I might tell myself, for example, that if my mother had been happier, I would never be so sad and blame her for my sadness. While there may be some truth in this story, blame just results in anger or more sadness and keeps me stuck. I have to forgive her and take responsibility for my emotions before I can live in the present and leave the past in the past.
We need to feel our pain in the present to move forward and not get stuck in the past. We can blame politicians, friends, lovers, our children—anyone—even life—for our difficulties, but until we turn inward and feel what’s going on with us, we will be the victims of our sorrow. Looking inside ourselves is often not easy to do. Sometimes we are not ready. We don’t have the skills or the wherewithal. Then, too, the more intense our sadness, the more we find it difficult to be with. At first, we may be in shock and even later only be able to experience the sorrow for brief periods. Most, if not all, of us are incapable of dealing with some childhood wounds until we are adults and may then be several years doing so. Just a few days ago, I found myself once more sorrowing over my parents’ failure to be openly loving and of their parents’ failures to be so and so on and on back through my ancestors.
To feel our sorrow, we drop into the body and feel the sensations and emotions of the sadness. For me, this is a sinking feeling that settles in my lower abdomen and becomes a kind of hollowness. My eyes and face contract and get hot as the swell of tears rises up. With the tears, comes a great sense of release. Paradoxically, simply letting the sadness be, weeping, hurting, or crying out our pain, we begin to move through the feelings and learn we can bear them. In Jane Hirschfeld’s words:
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
The more we can accept and experience our sadness, the more we can bear.
Resilience is one benefit of facing our sorrow each and every time we feel it.
Compassion is another. When we understand how we struggle against feeling sad and when we experience the depth of our sadness, we feel for all the other people in the world troubled similarly. We know how others have comforted and helped us. So we want to be there for those who are struggling under the weight of their sorrow—to listen to them and do what we can.
Compassion is, of course, a form of love, perhaps the best kind. It requires respect for the individuals’ need to work through their sadness on their own terms and at their own pace. While leaving others free to do so, we are with them, accompanying them on their journey with kindness and a willingness to be of service, not attached to any specific outcome. Such love is the way out. It is the flip side of our sorrow, the reason why we are sad. If I didn’t love the world, I wouldn’t care about all of the things that I listed in the beginning of this piece—climate change, war, homelessness, and so forth. It is because I want humanity and the Earth to thrive and survive that I lament all that gets in the way.
Interestingly, if not surprising, as I read poetry about sadness over and again, many poets explore the connection between love and sadness. In “Goldfish Are Ordinary” by Stacie Cassarino, the speaker thinks of buying goldfish to cheer up her sad lover. She sees the “grace and brilliance of the goldfish,” although the boy selling the fish calls them ordinary and shows her a purple beta fish, asking if she wants “to see aggression,” and then drops minnows into its bowl to be ravaged. The speaker ends the poem with these lines:
Outside, in the rain, we love
with our hands tied,
while things tear away at us.
Here love is a defense against sadness, but a defense sorely threatened.
The same is true in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which concludes with these lines:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
In “Longing, “ Paul Dunbar tells the oft repeated story of being sad because his lover is absent:
If you could walk with me upon the strand to-day,
And tell me that my longing love had won your own,
I think all my sad thoughts would then be put away,
And I could give back laughter for the Ocean’s moan!
Dunbar, too, sees love as a defense against sadness. But in this poem, we find an explicit thought that’s only implicit in the other poems: that absence of love is often the cause of sadness. Here we see how our longing for what we love gets in the way of our accepting things as they are.
This longing can be a kind of grasping after what we don’t have, perhaps even an obsession with getting that for which we long, a desire that we can’t let go. To the degree that we convince ourselves we must have whatever we long for, we suffer; that is, intense longing is extremely painful. If I must have someone’s love and don’t get it, my life can be hell—as most popular music tells us much too often.
Somewhat similarly, if our parents don’t love us in the ways that we need to become happy, secure, and loving adults, we may resent, blame, and reject them. I think we’d be surprised at how many adults are still depressed by what happened to them as children or at how many parents suffer because of their adult children’s rejection. I suspect that many of us have also been terribly hurt when treasured relationships with friends ended. Similarly, confronted with aging, injury, and death, we can devote all our energy toward having a youthful body and resist the pain, tiredness, extra care, and slowness required by a fragile, aging body, eventually to be dismayed as our body ages and disappoints our dreams of youth.
Suffering is no less evident when we cling to what we want on a societal level. If we passionately long for Trump’s defeat or the reversal of climate change or the end of our political divisiveness or the absence of war, we will suffer. We will be angry, resentful, restless, uptight, rigid, and swept away in our ardor. Peace, happiness, acceptance, and joy will be unavailable when obsessions take over our lives.
So should we not want people to love us or want a healthy, able body or want Biden to win or climate change, political division, and war to end? Of course not. Human beings will always have likes, dislikes, choices, opinions, and wishes. But the more intensely we hold our preferences, the more we suffer. I know my sadness about reality arises because I want it to be different. I also know that when I was younger and more intense about everything, I was often tormented by anger because I so wanted reality to be different. Sorrow is better than anger. There is more acceptance of the way things are. But there is still some resistance and, therefore, some suffering.
Can I see reality clearly, want it to be different, and not be sad? Sometimes now. Perhaps more so in the future, depending on how much future I have. As my capacity for compassion grows, so does my ability simply to be present with whatever is. Then I can understand and accept that I and every other human being is the product of causes and conditions beyond our ability to control and that we are all doing the best we can. Then I can love myself and everyone else. And love is our best defense against sadness and other forms of suffering.
But for now sometimes I am very sad. And when I am, I sit with my sadness, listen to its stories, drop into my body and feel its presence there, realize that we all feel sad at times, and then compassion arises for all of us. The more I do this, rather than turn away from or stuff my sorrow, the more compassion I have—the more love. And I am inspired—without anger or sorrow—to work for change that would make this world a happier place. May we all learn from our sadness. May we welcome it, listen to it, feel it, bathe it in compassion, and release the love that underlies it. May we love the world exactly as it is even as we seek to make it more loving. Let it be so.