There are things in life that make us sad. There is no escaping this. Sadness comes in varying degrees. Some sadness is brief, and drifts away on its own in a moment or a day. Other sadness arrives, ripping a hole in our heart, and takes up residence there for a long time. With this kind of longterm sadness you need a plan, or you will drown in it.
This kind of sadness has graced my life this year and I almost drowned in it. Very slowly I found, inch by inch, day by day, that I made a plan. My plan was to do new and different things that had nothing to do with the past. My first clue that this was to be the plan was music. I had to completely change what I listened to and listen to music I wasn’t familiar with. Next was people. I had to go out and make new friends that weren’t associated with the source of my sadness. While my sadness remained, and because I had to feel and experience it in order to push through it, other things were needed so I was not consumed by it.
I came upon this solution accidentally, in my morning meditation. Mark Nepo said it more eloquently than I ever could.
“The idea here is not to divert the sadness, but to give it a context from life other than what is making you sad. Just as a ginger can lose its bitterness when baked in bread, sadness can be leavened by other life. When feeling the sharpness of being sad or hurt, it helps to take new things in. This pours the water of life on the fire of the heart. So when exhausted from expressing all that hurt, listen to music you’ve never heard of, or ask someone to tell you an old story from before your birth, or take a drive down a road near a ridge you’ve always meant to look out from. Look with your sad eyes on things new to you that will give you something to do with your sadness. Your sadness is the paint. You must find a canvas.”
My canvas has been this blog, and my words on moving through pain, my paint. The journey back to a self I haven’t seen for a long time has given me a place to put my sadness. The pictures have grown brighter over the past month. As I remain in the “ebb tide”, the energy of impending movement builds daily. A whole new self has grown underneath the sadness and is slowly emerging. Taking in new things is helping the new me appear a little more each day. I am discovering there is more to life than that which is making me sad. Just like the tide, the sadness is ebbing and moving slowly away.
And so, as another day goes by, I am letting windows teach me how to let light in, and ….I have written.
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