A Little Sadness Can Mean A Lot

Some part of me is deeply unhappy, always. There’s a part which is ecstatic, and one which is nervous, insecure and lip-biting, one which is serious and ambitious, and rushes with a laptop through the airports, cherishing the moment of belonging there, being one of them – all the normal people, the successful business(wo)men, some of whom are anything-but, though I'll never learn that for sure.There is a part which would go dancing and one which would rather stay at home. There’s one that’s always forgiving, and one that’s always mad. And they all inhabit me, a whole crowd inside my head, waking me up at nights, but never in the morning.

Walt Whitman would agree: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes”. Even that sad part in myself, which often takes control, can be happy, which is quite difficult to explain. Being sad can be happiness, too. And the other way round. When I’m sad because something has finished, then at least I know for sure that I was happy a moment before. I was happy and now it’s official. That’s the happiness of being sad.

But now I learn there is also a part of me, a-part-ent-ly (a special word designed especially for this special occasion), which is at the same time a whole, which in turn is part of an even larger whole, so large that it is infinite, which is Oneness or Nothing, and what’s even better: you’re in it, too. This part is the most predominant (and the most suppressed in our everyday existence). It simply IS, and as I AM, I am. How is that for a sense of life? Just to BE?

Be-ing brings me to be-es. And those, in turn, bring me to honey. “Although eating honey is a very good thing to do, there is a moment before you begin to eat it which is better than when you are” (Pooh).  I suppose, the problem with being sad and unable to get out of that sadness is that you don’t see the jar of honey neither in front of you, nor in the cupboard, nor in the basement, and you can’t imagine someone else can have it for you. But if you are large, and contain multitudes, the chances are that there is a jar of honey, or at least a promise of a jar of honey, or some hope for one in one of the compartments of yourself. The tears of sadness that my pillow soaks up have the same composition as the tears that blur my vision when I revisit this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qssvnjj5Moo

“There was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid...ever.” (American Beauty)