56ºF (13ºC) !?! / Being Sad

I don't remember EVER wearing a wool scarf here in August before. Normally we're sweltering, the whole month.

(I'm at the coffee shop this morning   >
about to start editing a ms.)

Strange days indeed.

How to Be Sad

I was house sitting over the weekend and felt quite chirpy. 
But when I came home to an empty house, I felt slayed with sadness again. Marz was at work but she has already left, really.

Yea verily, I felt feeble and sore broken, as David says (Psalm 38:8, KJV) (tho' I wouldn't join  him in saying, "I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart").

Classic avoidance move of the 21st century: 
I turned on my laptop. 

I googled How to Be Sad.
This result intrigued me: 
"Not to know how to be sad, not to dare to be sad and not to dare to be dissatisfied in depression"

And then I laughed when I clicked on it and saw:
"[Article in German]"

It reminds me of a friend whose PhD adviser turned her dissertation back saying it was too accessible and should instead "read as if it had been translated from German."

I didn't find what I was looking for on the first couple pages of results. 
Mostly it was inverted: how NOT to be sad, or it was advice on how to act sad, like for theater. 
Or it was advice for parents on how to help kids deal with sadness, some of it using this summer's movie Inside Out, with its great message that it's OK to be blue.

I actually found some comfort in this article, "How Inside Out Can Teach Evangelicals to Be Sad":

 “In the Protestant West today,” writes theologian Ben Myers [in "On Smiling and Sadness"], “smiling has become a moral imperative. The smile is regarded as the objective externalisation of a well-ordered life. Sadness is moral failure.

But this wasn’t Jesus’ way. Scripture never tells of Jesus smiling, though he certainly wept. Instead, Scripture calls Jesus “the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” Jesus—who knew better than anyone the promise of eternal joy—was not a jolly messenger of cosmic bliss, but a suffering servant."

I like that, but then the article goes on to say we're sad because of sin, and the cure for sadness is God, who will end sadness. 
Which is rather circular and brings you back to the reason evangelicals think you shouldn't be sad in the first place, eh?

I am sometimes sad because of "sin," if I translate "sin" to "lack of skill" (lack of skill at opening our hearts, using our brains, and washing our hands). 
After all, I gave up writing the garbage book because I couldn't stand looking at our crushing, collective lack of skill.

But I'm not thinking of this sadness of mine as something that I need to avoid or cure, but as a natural response to loss––plain old grief, in fact––that deserves its due.

Even though I do try to wriggle out of it, because it doesn't feel good, at heart I know how to be sad.

It starts with letting myself sit with sadness. Dare to be sad. Be a lump.

Think of heart ache as another muscle cramp: stretch into it. Gently.  As in Rumi's advice to welcome sorrow when it arrives at your door,  in his poem "The Guest House".
 
Or, for me, Bridget Jones singing "All By Myself" is  a pretty good picture of what I mean by leaning into sadness:


Maybe some tapioca pudding would help? Not straight out of the fridge, let it warm up to room temp.
I mean, however I might treat a sad, tired, hurt child, try that.

Eventually I've always found that sadness passes (different than depression, which can be relentless and dangerous)---it drains away. 

And then I pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again. [There begins a whole different list.]