A Deeper Understanding of Our Times of Intermittent Sadness

Article Highlights:

• The mind lacks wisdom
• Sadness: Midwife of the new
• Let it give its gift

Dearest,

So many people, including myself, are reporting feeling deeply and almost inexplicably sad at times. For me, it seems to come and go like a vapor or scent that engulfs me for a while, sometimes quite intensely, before dispersing. Perhaps you are also experiencing this?  It’s about rebirth and what we are leaving behind.

I’ve noticed that when it comes upon me, my mind tries to attach to something that explains it. “I am sad about this thing,” my mind will say, “or that.” Often my mind suggests causes I think are long resolved, and this surprises me so I question my mind.  I’ve learned that in this, the mind is often completely wrong.

Knowing that the mind will always explain the what and why of things – that’s its job after all – we must also be smart enough to question the mind. Because the mind has experience but not necessarily real wisdom.  

“No,” I often think, “it is not always as my mind says, that I am sad about this or that familiar thing, frequently not.”  Over time I’ve come to understand that sadness is frequently part of something far more wonderful and mysterious happening.  

As my understanding grew I began to recognize sadness as a treasure and to wonder how to clarify it, wanting to write down this insight for my myself, and to share with others. Then, one happy morning I picked up a favorite book, one I often return to. Reading, I discovered to my delight that I no longer needed to write about my new view of sadness. Someone else already had done so, masterfully and beautifully and with great illumination.

The German author and poet, Rilke, understood sadness like the mystic he was. He proffered the view that we might understand sadness as a positive component of personal growth.  And not only when grieving, but as an important and clarifying part of the natural transitions in our lives.  

His writings are so illuminating that he’s our guest writer for this article, as we better understand the often mysterious sadnesses that can encompass us these days.  In Letters to a Young Poet (public library,) Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926,) writes:

“You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? … Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet still a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.”

“Almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, — is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.

We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside.

The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, the new steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary — and toward this our development will move gradually — that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us.”
 
“So you must not be frightened … if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?”

And we can say, “thank you Rilke; what a great master you were of the deeper understandings of life, a mystical writer of poetry and prose.” I treasure those who, like he, bring the light of true being to us in their words, don’t you?

Sadness is a midwife of the new.  It does this deeper than our mind can plumb; it does this for us beyond any need of our assistance, save that we be with the sadness and allow the process.  And know when it’s time to help it take its leave.  

This is easy to know if we are not clinging to it by believing the mind’s theories and explanations and spending undue time on them.  We can easily know when to help it take its leave if we cease thinking we must do something about it.

There will be a moment when we know we have honored it fully enough and allowed it its workings. At that time, we can then help it pass by lifting our spirits in simple ways. We can say a prayer of thanks, call a friend, or play a favorite song or video, make a meal, watch a little TV, sit quietly in the warmth of the sun.  And we can feel pleased with ourselves, knowing we have done well.

Be gentle with yourself when sadness comes, dear one, but embrace it without fear or impatience.  It is the new entering you.  In doing so it slowly causes what is old and finished to loosen loosen and release in us and to be left behind or transformed.  Sadness can be a gift doing your work for you.  

Paying homage to sadness with gratitude today, in this moment, I feel that lovely bond we share when united in the truth of what it’s really like to be human.

I love our shared humanness so very much,
Mayet Leilani
** Art by Inside Out