The subject of sadness came up last week, specifically from one of our readers - Joy - who had received a complaint about her poetry being 'too sad', and I thought what a great subject for next week's ramble .. I just love the image of a purple haired poet named Joy sprinkling little dollops of sadness everywhere she goes. Like, oops there goes one in my beer and now I'm crying.
But, why do we avoid sadness? Are we afraid of a little depression? What is this obsessive pursuit of happiness in our culture? It's even written into our constitution, and we're addicted to all kinds of substances from pursuing it, and not getting it. Could it be we're all selfish brats, and when we don't get the happiness that we want, we get outraged, and then feel sorry for ourselves.
It's a self-centered baby response, but it's essential to our first moves in life, to our individual identity, separate from the Mother.
Our shock of being born into a cold world makes our reptile mind cry out and get what we need to survive, we get the boob then we're happy. But what if sadness is the emotion that evolved us into human beings and gave us our first pangs of empathy. That's also essential to survival.
To learn a lesson from babies, studies have shown that when a baby cries around other babies, they all start crying as well. You may say that they're imitating, but some babies naturally reach out to the original crying baby and together they get through it. -show picture- awwww...
It's not a selfish or an adult response. An adult responds to crying with annoyance or anger or cooing, and tries to fix the problem. A baby doesn't care about the noise in her ears - she could cry all day - all she knows is that she feels sad too, and somehow that forms a connection that eventually dries up the tears.
So, how do we lose our ability to empathize over time, to naturally reach out to others in pain? Why have we become so fearful and dismissive and contemptuous of tribes that are not our own? One of the reasons, I believe, is that we're systematically trained by society to see others as alien. We're taught over here that there are people in the Middle East out to get us and destroy our way of life, and they are being taught over there that we're attacking them in their homeland. Both are true, but who's purpose does it serve to perpetuate the cycle of violence as a justifiable and defensive response? We call them terrorists, and they call us satanic. It's an eye for eye that keeps the wars going forever.
And maybe that's the whole point. We have been at war forever. When I was an angry teenager in the 80's I felt my government was at war with me and my friends. Reagan was in power and he joked into a live mic on TV about how he was going to 'bomb the Soviet Union back into the Stone Age. The bombing begins in five minutes.'. The entire press corps laughed at it. I knew that the war on drugs was really a war on the inner city, and I knew that the government was letting AIDS fester because they thought gays deserved it. Reagan was always bombing or invading somewhere, and I was convinced that I was going to be drafted to die in the jungle in Nicaragua or a desert in Libya. Hell, they were showing us graphic films of worldwide nuclear annihilation in school (remember 'The Day After), and then telling us that if that were to happen, we were supposed to duck under our desks while the missiles were incoming!
It was in that context, on a beautiful morning, that our teachers dragged us into the common room to watch the space shuttle launch on TV, because there was a teacher on board. When the shuttle exploded, I laughed. I couldn't help it. I didn't care about the loss of life. Here was America getting it's come-uppance. I saw the space shuttle as a symbol of American imperialism and arrogance and to see it blow up was satisfying to my naive sense of justice. I showed a shocking lack of empathy, not only for the people on board, but to the people around me who were upset at watching it live, and undoubtedly they thought of me as a bad person. It was easy for me to do, because I had trained myself to think of people in the government, even innocent astronauts, as the enemy.
Another bright morning years later, had me feeling differently. It was my 32nd birthday - September 11th, 2001, and almost as soon as I was awake - happy to be alive - my neighbor popped in the door and told me to turn on my TV. We were under attack. As I watched those buildings come down, I felt nothing but sadness. Now, maybe I should feel equally sad about all the atrocities all over the world, but when your neighbor's house burns down you feel the heat, and I had lived in New York for almost a decade prior. I had delivered packages to those buildings as a bike messenger. Also, I felt something else. It was a sickening sense of Deja Vu. As I stared at the rolling clouds of dust in the buildings coming down on the screen, it was like one of those backward films where a million puzzle pieces drop on the floor and they all fall perfectly to form the picture. I had been looking at those exact same clouds in a dream I had two weeks before. Every detail and moving shadow was being replayed over and over as I watched in horror.
I often have adventure dreams in an urban setting. My friends and I are generally part of a tribe of loosely affiliated squatters who travel between each other's buildings on secret skywalks and tunnels, and we often get of town to idyllic settings on the shore. It's a nice premise, and we go from there... On this particular dream I was walking into town when I noticed most of the general public had stopped milling around and were all staring up at the sky, transfixed, with their mouths open, like a gaggle of turkeys watching a rain cloud form above them.
The shapes in the clouds were hypnotic. There was slowly revolving faces mouthing silent words and spells, and ancient symbols rippled up and down in swirling, spiral patterns.
I caught myself being drawn in, and I looked around at street level to see what else was going on. There were frogmen in wetsuits gathering on every street corner. They were inflating a fleet of rubber motor boats and getting ready for something big, swiftly cordoning areas off the city. No one else was noticing. They were stuck dead in their tracks - faces up to the cloud - as water started pouring out of the basements of all the buildings and slowly started flooded up the streets.
Seeing that we were being trapped, I rushed out to find my friends and we stole a boat and escaped from the frogmen as they were concentrating on herding everyone into holding pens. Many further adventures ensued in my dream, but I know how boring that gets, and the relevant part of the story is the cloud that everyone was watching was the exact same cloud I was watching on the TV as the World Trade Center came down.
Now I'm not sure I believe in black magic, but when I saw that cloud, I thought "Oh fuck. Here we go". And it's been oh fuck ever since.
Still, I have faith in a different kind of magic. It's an Aikido-style magic that redirects spirits. I know that nothing is permanent. That everything is reversible. And no-one is above redemption.
It's true that can't push a waterfall uphill, but if you channel that energy, and spin it in a different direction, you can create light, and heat. It's hard, but we can still flip the spiral before we go down the tubes.
So, I think about what that dream was trying to tell me - If you want to survive - look around! Don't become hypnotized. And, still on my birthday every year it's 9-11, and I have a mixed emotions. I'm happy and sad, and I think that's good practice. How do I honor something like that, without falling into the sticky dark of negativity? I remember how lucky and happy and gifted I am to be alive. And I try and be grateful for every day, especially on my birthday.
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