TASTING THE BITTER WITH THE SWEET
Sometimes I find that after I write a column for Sixty and Me, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Last month I wrote an article entitled ‘So Much Pressure to be Up’. To quote myself: “If we are going to be full human beings, we cannot avoid sadness. Sorrow and loss are part of living. Periods of lack of confidence, lack of hope and lack of energy are inevitable. There is nothing wrong with us if we experience these feelings. To me, the point is just not to be stuck there.”
This is what I have been thinking about, and I would like to take it one step further. Beyond not getting stuck there, beyond giving ourselves permission to have down times, perhaps we could actually honour these feelings and the special state we are in when we are somewhat down.
I am not talking about what could be called a clinical depression, where we lose interest in everything for long periods at a time. What I am referring to could be called melancholia or the blues – a time when hurtin’ music feels healing.
How can it be that hurtin’ music feels good when we feel bad?
Someone who asked herself that question, and wrote a book about how she answered it, is Susan Cain. I am reading her book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. For those of us who have those feelings, it is such a validation!
Our sorrows and our longings, she suggests, come from our sensitivity to being separated from our best selves, even from humanity’s best possibilities. This can show up in our more mundane issues when we feel we could be loved more or could love more ourselves.
Susan Cain talks about loving music in a minor key. There is a piano piece by Brahms (an Intermezzo, which so aptly in Italian means something in between) I often listen to when I need deep companionship in my sorrow. Either that, or some Hawaiian music I bought when I was in Hawaii nursing a deep hurt. Both these pieces of music remind me of a line of poetry I love by Gerrard Manley Hopkins: “Sorrow’s springs are the same.”
The music and the sorrow that accompanies it seem to expand the soul. In that space, we are often creative, seeking expression for what we feel. It is a time we can contemplate our lives and make changes. The feeling it evokes fosters compassion, and connection with all that is.
It is as if, for a time, we can put our weight on our back foot, rather than our front foot. The world is slightly different there. As poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “Things as they are, are changed upon the blue guitar.”
We can look upon this state as an opening, an opening that contains possibilities we can’t reach in our more ordinary way of being, or, to go back to Intermezzo, when we aren’t in the in-between zone. Not just a source of pain, sorrows can also be a source of growth that allows us to feel more.
Janice Skinner, my long-time yoga teacher, often exhorts us as we practise to “feel everything”. To me, this suggests a conscious act of permission I give myself. I have had a good and fortunate life, and yet sorrow and longing are part of who I am. Perhaps I can welcome them more fully when they come to call, and see them as reminders. Reminders of what, exactly? I’m still not sure. But I treasure them.