This Monday brings me many changes. New routines and new ways of thinking and feeling. A period of adjustment you might say. I hate change. Especially when for me, there was nothing wrong with the old way. *sigh* But change pretty much comes as certainly as the sun comes up in the East each day.
This change is difficult for me, and so I am quite sad today.
I’ve come to understand that there are different kinds of sadness. Some cut into the soul, they destroy seemingly everything that might have been built. I’ve never really been able to deal with that kind of sadness. I accept it, but over the course of my life, I’ve let it take from me instead of teach me.
Then there is another kind of sadness,(I’ve discovered) the kind that brings a certain pleasure when you weep. This sadness lives in another place inside the soul, in the places we keep private, in the places we only share with a very few. It does not tear at the soul, or scar it. It does not destroy all that has been built. It in fact does not take anything away, even though loss is at the center of it.
I believe it can only be discovered in the wake of truth, love and real intimacy between two people. It’s a truth that can preserve the reality of all that has occurred. And because of this, it is a completely different kind of sadness, one that is bittersweet, but one that caresses with each pang of loss.
I hate change. I really do. But, there is a deep calmness in me, not the hysterical kind of emotional turmoil that can accompany a loss. Instead it is a deep calmness, a stillness, at the center is sadness and tears, but they do not cut at my soul, they almost comfort me. And I will be honest, there is something there that I love despite the sadness.
I suppose I love who and what has caused the sadness more than the pain of change and my fear of the future. That’s a strange new realization. That love could make suffering sweet. I know poets write about it, and movies tell tales of it, but to feel it as a reality in your soul. Who could have known I’d find this place in my life.
It’s as if this feeling were really at the core of the essence of the ‘risk’ we all take when we really open up to be intimate with another. In the end you just know it was all worth it, and that you’d do it again if given the chance. That you would beg for the chance. As if the sadness were just part of the whole, and not just all that is left. It quite frankly has a sweetness to it. An emotional suffering to be sure, but a sweetness that I cannot seen to articulate, but I know it is there. It hurts so much, and yet it does not hurt at all….
And so, there is a certain pleasure in weeping.
