The Beauty in Sorrow
Do you ever put
on a sad song or a sad movie, or get out some old pictures, or watch some old
videos, or just sit and reminisce, with the deliberate attempt to feel a
certain way? A certain bit of a coordinated sense of longing, or sorrow? Perhaps
you’re not quite sure exactly what you want to feel, but you know you want to
feel something powerful. Maybe you've
just been through some tragic ordeal and you need to relate with something, or
maybe you're falling into old memories of long-lost times, just tragically
misplaced in this crazy world we inhabit and you merely want to bask in the
familiarity that these memories can bring back to the surface. Or maybe you're
not even sad at all but just want to enjoy the depths of the emotions on
display in these acts. You might just be a little bit lonely and simply want to
identify with something you can feel deep
inside your core. I, for one, can relate to each of these and I don’t doubt
that any reader can as well. Sorrow is one of those things that you can always
rely on to fill you with emotions so powerful because your own interpretations of
a thing define how much impact it has, and this can be a wonderfully beautiful
thing if your will is powerful enough to utilize it toward some gain.
There are of
course a vast many causes for one to be sad, ranging from the loss of a dear
friend or pet or family member to a tragic breakup or distant memories of some
cherished good times…the possibilities extend endlessly in between and on
either side of the broad scope of what usually brings us to this place where
sorrow broods solitude. They all have their own varying degrees of severity, of
duration and depth, but they are all similar in that they belong to the same
sort of "family" or class of emotions. They all invoke whatever longing
emotions you have attached to them, amplified to whatever extremes by whatever
severity they originate from through your personal experiences and the weight
of consideration you’ve placed upon them. Sometimes you just want that intensity. It puts you in a particular
realm of thought, emotionally, where you can then look upon everything else
from a certain unique vantage point that doesn’t exist in the normal routine
mindsets that generally occupy your thoughts. And from such a vantage point you
can appreciate whatever brought you there so much more deeply, so much more
wholeheartedly, even if only in retrospect in order to avoid a recurrence of
whatever the source is. This is definitely valuable, but there is so much more to be enjoyed if you have
the proper mindset. By no means does such an emotional state have to be
entirely a bad thing.
There is a
deep-rooted beauty in the musings of sorrow. I've always thought this was a bit
strange, a little counterintuitive somehow, although I've felt and appreciated such
emotions for as long as I can remember. Positivity buried inside the negative
manifests a certain kind of hope and admiration of life. Even when I was a
little guy, as early as eight or nine, developing my tastes for my very first
“favorite songs,” they tended to be sad ones. And I know now that I didn’t
actually even truly understand the depths and the meanings of the songs I
adored—I had of course never truly loved, or lost, friendly or romantically, or been otherwise
emotionally damaged or esteemed… but I adored them anyway, even if I was
singing along with lyrics I could not possibly comprehend. Looking back, I’m
sure that one of the primary reasons was for the certain quality of the vocals
in such songs. I had already discovered a love for the emotional display of a
singer singing a sad song. There’s something in the voice, in the finest among
this class of music, which stands apart, especially when the singer seems to be
particularly passionate about the song. A raw display of emotion and the
unashamed willingness to express it to anybody who cares to listen has this
immensely deep beauty which I cannot help but admire and empathize with. I
still remember holding my little cassette recorder up to my alarm clock/radio before
I was even a decade old and recording songs I liked when they happened to play
on the radio. This was my introduction to the concept of creating playlists
like I still spend so much time doing today. The tradition has remained,
evolving along with the technology involved. I still listen to some of those
very first songs, some fifteen years later. Some of them I even now understand
and relate to on a personal level, which has only helped to enhance their
values.
At first the
idea seems a bit counterintuitive, of sadness being a desirable emotion to seek
out, because I think sadness is generally (and not necessarily for bad reasons)
considered to be an undesirable one. But with the proper considerations you can
escape from this gravity well of negativity that seems to pull so many far
beyond any enjoyable level. I've become a lot more comfortable with this over the
years, and I've found that if you look a little deeper there are some
undeniable and incredible benefits as long as your mindset is sound and
effective enough to realize them. There is so much raw, unfiltered beauty down
there in the depths of sorrow, just laid bare for you to see and identify with
and perhaps even reconcile.
From such a
mindset you have the most potential to gain—at your will, of course. It is of
utmost importance that you don't just sit and wallow in the sorrow. This is
where the generic unfavorable viewpoint from most people comes from, I think. It
seems to be a cliché that sorrow brings further sorrow, and nothing else. As if
it’s an endlessly spiraling descent into hopeless despair with no personal
value until you manage to halt your fall and haul yourself back up without ever
looking back down. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be this way, because this
vantage point from the depths of your mindset is where everything else looks
most beautiful. When you've sunk to
some level, everything that is now above you looks so much better in its new light. This is perhaps the easiest gain
to get out of all this: the appreciation of something that you once took for
granted, now that you’re gazing longingly up at it. Maybe you will get it back,
and maybe you won’t, and maybe you never actually lost it. Whatever the case
you will have a better, hopefully more appreciative understanding of it, and
how to hold on to it or how you might have lost it and how you might reacquire
it.
Basking in this
state of emotions, down there in the lonely pits of your mind, what once was dull
and uninterestingly familiar now appears so beautiful up there above you… and
what once was already beautiful now looks even
more beautiful. And even what once looked dark and fearsome down there
underneath you now looks merely dull and familiar once you’re staring it in the
face. In other words, everything just got
better, at the cost of your relative position. I think this is the critical
thing to consider. You have to be able to accept this realization that you are
in a “lower” place now, but from this lowering you have a heightened potential
to appreciate. And you should make the fullest possible use of this
opportunity. You can grant yourself access to appreciations otherwise overlooked
in your day-to-day routine. They are always there; they are always in your
grasp… but understandably, they get lost in the daily motions of a busy life.
And so this is why I feel like some time occasionally set aside to focus on
such emotions is such a valuable pursuit. Put together a playlist of the
deepest and most heartfelt of the more emotional songs in your collection, or
some touching movies or books or poems and when you find yourself with some
downtime get them out and just enjoy relishing in the gloriously beautiful
displays of affection and feelings that these artists are pouring their hearts
out over. They don’t want you to feel miserable; they want you to have
something to connect with and share
with you. They want you to be comforted by the idea that so many other people
have felt very similar feelings, and they can be shared with the world in all
their sorrowful glory. And they can be
overcome.
It’s a rather
generic saying that you should not “dwell on the past.” And while there is
definitely some value to this, there is also some value to doing just that. It’s the ratio between considerations of the past,
present and future that really matter—because the past happened. And this past, utterly unique to you, influenced you and
your present state of being in the most profound and intricate ways imaginable.
Be it good or bad, everything that you’ve ever been through is valuable to your
collective experiences of life. A hopeful future is much more solidified if you
have the gains from your past miseries (and successes, of course) to build
from. If you can spend some time considering some past event, and its
consequences on later events and on your own present mindset, then you should
be able to glean some sort of insight into something
deeply meaningful. Good memories, whether or not you are in a comparatively
“good” situation at the moment, should bring you happiness. But if your present
state is a particularly troublesome one, then such goodness might be in
conflict with a powerful sense of longing and threaten to pull you down even
farther. This is normal, though, up to a reasonable level, and is combatable
with a strong will. Understand where the line between what is not able to be influenced
(but has every possibility of providing insight) and what you actually have
control over (the present and future) is. In this way all of your musings can
be constructive.
And even if
your present state is actually a particularly good one then you will probably
experience some sense of longing anyway when you let such emotions flow. Your
first-hand knowledge of the outcomes of even the most tragic memories helps to
paint them in a positive light. Nostalgia doesn’t differentiate much with
“good” or “bad” (at least in my experience); it merely reflects on past events
that you miss simply because they are
gone. There are always ways to appreciate memories, if you care to seek
them out. You just need to know what you’re doing, know what you intend to gain
from this pursuit, and how you can relate it to the present day. Don’t see it
as “dwelling” in its negative sense, but see it as dwelling positively by evaluating
and cherishing and learning. In this
way, effectively executed, you can’t go wrong because you can only gain and
benefit. Because you are still alive today you have survived whatever
experiences of your past you remember to be so troublesome, and they now offer
so much potential in analysis.
But putting
aside the potential to evaluate and learn and improve, both the deepest and
highest beauties still remain. Because at the bare root of it all, emotions on
display are beautiful because they are
laid bare. How often have you refrained from telling somebody something
because you were uncomfortable with putting yourself so far out on the limb? It
can be a terrifying thing… and so the courage to do so is beautiful in itself. Emotional
songs (as well as other media) are so successful because, to a degree, we all feel the same things. Our minds
aren’t so very different. They are shaped by experiences so unique to us that I
think this consideration of species-wide similarity is easy to overlook. But it
is so powerful a thing, to realize the similarities that exist between all of
us despite utterly unique sets of experiences personally. On a fundamental
level we are all so much alike, despite vast differences in appearances and
habits and experiences. If you are feeling something, deep in your core, rooted
to yourself so deeply that you can hardly imagine anyone else feeling the same
way, there must be countless others who feel something so similar that the self-righteous
comparison is almost trivial. You can
find a connection to relate with, if you are willing to genuinely try. Even
your next-door neighbor you might not have ever spoken to most likely has
depths of feelings more than enough to form a powerful bond with.
This is beauty
in its highest regard. The miniscule differences that separate each of us,
genetically, and yet make up individuals so
unique, yet at the same time so familiar to each other in the grand scheme
of things, is absolutely incredible!
My mind is so boggled by my thoughts of such things, and how privileged a
position each of us is in. I oftentimes find myself so troubled by the
unwillingness of people to share their deeper thoughts and feelings with one
another, or even with themselves, and
yet at the same time I find myself so amazed and prideful at the humble display
of so many others who are eager to
share with others. There is definitely a rift between the two extremes. We, as
humans, are the only beings who can understand each other on anywhere near this level. And so every
single possible connection is priceless—there should not be any reason to give
it up entirely. But the very attributes that set us apart from every single
other species also give us the capacity and the “reasons” to fear and avoid
such interactions. This is understandable, of course, in its own right, as I am
certainly one who fits into this unfortunate pattern at times. Some people just
do not present themselves as approachable at this level, for whatever reasons,
in which case there is only so much you can do. But I am always trying my
hardest to fight it. And I want to try my hardest to inspire others to fight it,
as well. Because the capacities of our emotions are so incredible, so unrivaled
and so inherent of so much more potential than any other creatures on the Earth
that I find it among the most tragic of disasters that so much of this
potential is left to wither away and die rather than being embraced and shared
among us.
In the midst of
all the chaos of everyday life, there just isn’t time to devote the resources
of the mind to fully comprehend what is nesting away right there in each of our
heads to be gained from. But it is there.
And I think that the differences here, between what is commonly felt and what
is only felt during the most extreme cases, is one of the factors that make the
consideration so powerful. On a typical day, barring a random encounter with a
particularly deep thought or a memory or a song or a scene from a movie, we do
not tend to devote time to these depths within our minds. But this same
tendency creates the differential that gives so much value to these depths when
we can devote the time to
appreciate them, when that certain song does
randomly play on the radio or when we set out mindfully to click it. When
relating to someone who is sharing their sorrows—whether it’s an actor in a
movie or a singer in a song or a dear friend on the phone or sitting right
there next to you—the invoked feelings you must be experiencing are in such
contrast to what you feel in the vast majority of the passing moments of your
regular routine that the mere difference here provides a springboard for
appreciation and for empathy of the highest importance.
Empathy is what I’m trying to get at, here, overall. Empathy is when you
can be sorry and compassionate with
someone (even with someone portraying an actor or singing a song), and clothe
yourself in the mantle of another person's emotional reactions—to genuinely
understand and relate to what they’re going though. I think the capacity to
experience this is one of the highest beauties of this world. That any one of
us has the ability to peer so deep into the mind of another, to relate their
experiences with those of our own, and to offer our own personal insights and
our best personal advice or just simply share in the collective appreciation of
this connection, is just astounding. Pick any two random people in the world,
and (barring communication barriers) they have untold potential to share, to
learn, and to appreciate between and from each other.
…And there are over seven billion
of us. Endless possibilities abound.
So we can all do it—share, reflect, learn, and appreciate what each of us has to offer ourselves, and each other.
Even if it’s nothing more than a touching song that relates to something you’ve
been feeling, or through empathy have the capacity to feel almost as if you
did, and you feel like someone else might also feel for, this is a luxury. A
luxury beyond compare, because even though our minds and our hearts reside only
in our own experiences, we have the ability to express them for others to
relate to. Endless possibilities are laid daily at our feet, and at the feet of
others, and our minds are subject to nothing but our own applications of our
thoughts and feelings and experiences in terms of these. They can be shared, to
whatever extent any person is willing to share them. We all can identify with
each other with even the smallest effort. Even the deepest-felt sorrows are
really beauty-filled meadows with more than enough space for all of your
acquaintances and personal interests to gather and work together toward some
positive end. We all share this inherent capacity to relate to each other’s
feelings, and only offering some raw, unfiltered expressions will open the door
for others to come in and join you in your considerations. There is a profound
beauty in sorrow if we let it flow through our being and shape our understanding
of this crazy world and the events which unfold within it.
Sometimes there is nobody around you to share with, or at least nobody
who is willing to climb down beside you. In these cases, perhaps making up the
majority of such instances, it is crucial that you be able to work through the
pain and sorrow and regret entirely within the confines of your own mind to
find the beauty that is hidden within. Reminiscing on old, dearly missed good
times can foster more appreciation in that you ever even had the opportunity to
be so content. Reflecting on a failed relationship of any sort or some attempts
that never quite made it that far can bring some very troublesome feelings, but
they offer so much insight. So relating to a powerful song or scene from a
movie can help you because you can recognize
the sorrow in a way that applies it somehow to your own mind. And knowing that
somebody else in the world felt something so strikingly similar and was able to
express it in ways that channel the connection for you to grasp can be such a
comfort. Sometimes this is all you need in the world to feel a little bit more
at ease. Ultimately, sorrow makes the good, and even the potential for good,
that much more beautiful. And thus, the best is yet to come.
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