Sadness: An Antidote to Life
Life is a beautiful reality. However, in its entirety, life can be bitter as well.
Most of the times, life is all sunshine and happiness, appearing like a never-ending merry-go-round fun ride. And this half-truth is the root cause of all these misconceptions about sad and harsh realities of life.
This alternate side of the picture doesn’t give a beautiful outlook, rather it’s dreary and dull. The issue is, this aspect either goes unaddressed or ends up catching too much attention, making humans even more confused. So, I thought of penning down my thoughts, regarding this ever-perpetuating dilemma.
Let’s start with looking at life from a broader perspective.
There is a lot of truth in this statement that life is a beautiful reality and it is quite difficult or almost impossible to deny the veracity of such claims. However, at times, life puts us in a position we don’t want to be in, drags us to the events, we don’t want to experience and brings forth the emotions that we don’t want to exhibit.
Life, at times, doesn’t appear to be beautiful. Rather, it feels like a never-ending, dark tunnel of dystopia and sadness. By asking unanswerable questions and compelling us to endure the unbearable, life tests our innate vulnerability and makes us feel sad.
Also, being exposed to the harsh realities, we start thinking of our life as a lost cause, depressing all the hopes of getting better. Consequently, we, with our fragile and poor emotional outlook, end up falling prey to this otherwise-adaptive emotion.
Why?
Like several other misconceptions, there is a prevalent misapprehension that sadness is an all-bad emotion, it is only for the weak and it wears people down.
Our perception of sadness as some kind of negative emotion or a mal-behavior is completely wrong. There is no truth to it. Contrarily, research has shown that sadness is rather an adaptive emotion, ultimately benefiting us instead of wearing us down.
Lisa Firestone in her piece on this particular subject explains that sadness is a live emotion and it can help in awakening ourselves and adapting in accordance with our circumstances/environment.
Moreover, every emotion has its purpose and sadness is no different in this regard. All of our emotions act as a stimuli for either making us do something or stopping us from doing certain things. Sadness, like all these emotions, serves a purpose.
Example?
Let’s assume that a person ‘X’ is going through a failure or a heartbreak and does not have the slightest of the idea of how to approach things and get out of the slump. Now, here is the trick that most people do not seem to understand, this person needs balance or should I say that the most significant thing this person needs to do is to relax. He needs to stop controlling his life and let it be. And being in this state of sadness can help him in achieving that balance/ sense of relaxation.
How?
Well, Sadness does not provide the required relaxation rather it paves path for him to adjust himself to the circumstances.
By letting it be, by letting things go their natural route, he can bring his mind to a state where his mind will get the chance to achieve that particular stage of ease. As a result, he will get the balance or the calm, which I mentioned earlier, and this balance is essential for negotiating life.
Moreover, sadness, being an adaptive and constructive emotion, can help this person in not only getting out of this slump but it can also help him in reshaping his life. With all that reserved energy, he can either streamline it to do something good or he can let all that negativity to engulf him and leave him as a breathing dead body.
Another important thing to note is that sadness can’t be categorized as some binary entity, either good or bad. Rather, everyone has his/her own definition of it, mainly based on his/her subjective reality.
Nonetheless, there is one aspect of sadness, which we all of us should be aware of; the constructive and adaptive part of it. Because, the true understanding of sadness can not only save us from all that unnecessary numbness, but it can also lead us to a far better life.
Although I’m not sure about the conclusion, yet I strongly believe that at times, life can be a vexatious reality and, irrespective of all the mix-up, sadness can help us in coming out of it alive.
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