I was riding in the car with my husband the other day and he said, "Maybe one day you'll have a story from your past that isn't sad."
I gulped. I looked in my lap, then fluttered my eyes across the landscape of the Colorado mountains outside our car. My head felt like it was banging up against an invisible brick wall, as it often does.
Quickly I scanned my memory for something happy.
Oh, what about the time I negotiated my salary with a law firm for $12,000 higher?
That was happy, he said.
I tried to change the subject then to another happy story, but it ended up having a sad part in the middle. But don't worry, I apologized and then slumped down in my seat in an effort to let my body language do the talking for me, which is always a bad idea if you're married.
I felt ashamed and sad (for telling sad stories) as my mind was flipping through the emotion buttons being pushed inside me. Finally, my brain and all my myriad parts let me land.
I realize sad story telling might not be everyone's idea of a good time. And I'm not sure I could handle listening to the same volume of sad stories from another person if they weren't also healing me at the same time.
But it got my thinking, Why sad? Why dark? Why sorrow? And is that such a bad thing?
In practice, telling sad stories gives most of us an outlet, a way to process what has hurt us out loud with a fellow soldier to take note. It gives the sadness a way to see the light of day and be less of a haunting presence.
Most of my sad stories can pop to the surface in the snap of a finger. They're always there. Crisp, clear and ready to feel relevant to whatever someone is talking about. Sometimes the sad stories come screaming to the surface, and I have no choice but to say them out loud, or they'll begin chewing on my body parts from the inside out.
Sometimes I think the words to that famous song should've been, "Hello, Sadness, my old friend." Not everyone wants to admit they like the darkness, but everyone has been in the company of sadness.
Sadness has become such a friend to me that it's often the only thing that feels truthful. If you don't know how to be sad, I'm not sure we can be friends. I'm not sure I really relate with people who always, always, always catapult right over the grim reality of a situation to land in happy pastures. I kind of resent those people because it feels like the easy way through life, you know? To see everything as having a silver lining might be nice for you, but it just leaves someone like me feeling like I've done something wrong.
It wasn't until I studied the nature of impermanence and began exploring it in my daily, sometimes minute-by-minute, experiences of life that I discovered that sadness and joy go hand in hand.
And that means that they come and go just as quickly.
At first, I was gutted by this realization—what made me sad all the time is that joy dissolves.
It comes and goes. It has its own life force and cannot be clamped down and put into a jar. Joy rises up and it falls down. The cycle continues for eons. This isn’t what I was taught in Christianity. If you have Jesus, you should always have joy! Now that you follow God, you should never be sad about anything at all because what is sadder than who you were before, you know, when Jesus was planning to send you to burn in the fires of hell? Joy was supposed to be one of the ultimate signs that I was a leader you ought to follow. Nothing gets me down, God dammit. Except that it does … a lot, all the time, every day. And it’s taken me years to not be ashamed of sadness, despair and so on. Which is why I suppose I’m evening writing about my sad stories in the first place.
Because impermanence taught me to see things so differently. It taught me that just as joy can dissolve, so can sadness.
If part of joy's job is to radiate through our bodies so that we're bursting full of sunlight and Care Bear smiles just long enough to fill up our tanks and leave us, then, so too, is the job of sadness.
Sadness comes into us to do a job, to teach us something, to show us something new. Sadness shows up because we are human beings living in a world where sad things happen way too often. But it isn't the only one that might have the final word. It might have a lot of words, but it doesn't necessarily have the final word by default.
Sadness eventually gets digested, just as joy does. And I'm convinced that none of us have an access port to sadness without also being able to receive joy, somewhere, no matter how small.
If you're in a season where it feels like joy forgot how to make its way back in, I feel you. I've had seasons, decades even, where the sadness was so permeable that I thought I might infect people if they bumped into me too much. So I know it's probably really annoying to hear someone say this, but I'm going to say it anyways:
The joy is coming back.
That's its job.
And I know this because the minute sadness lands in your body, it begins digesting.
It offers a message, it gets to work and is ready to be on its way. I'm not exactly sure whether sadness transforms into joy, or if it merely mutates back and forth as part of the human condition. But if you ask anyone who has experienced immeasurable grief, they will tell you that the joy comes back. It might look and feel differently. You might find it living in a different part of your inner human hotel. But it does return.
When I think back to that conversation with my husband about my sad stories, I think I've learned something else.
I share the sad stories because I'm strong enough to say them out loud and not crumble to pieces.
They aren't bouncing around my insides and wreaking havoc on me.
They can rise inside me when I let them, and they can fall away again when I let them.
This back-and-forth with my own inner sadness might come across as evidence that I'm never happy.
But I know now that when I let sadness in, I’m also making room for something glad that is already on the way.
