Three Flavors of Sadness

Sometimes I wake up in the morning feeling sad. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. There are so many things to feel sad about these days. I think some of what I feel is a residue of the two years of Covid, when it seemed the headlines were filled with nothing but stories of sickness and death. Many people, I’m sure, are still feeling this residue and the effect on their lives. But aside from Covid, which has come and mostly gone like a terrible storm, there is continuing sadness in everyone’s lives. Why? Is it just that that’s the way it is? Waking up to it is disorienting. I know what I am feeling but I don’t always know why.

So I ask myself, why am I feeling sad? What is behind this feeling? In pursuing this inquiry over many weeks and mornings, I realize that for me there is not one kind of sadness, but many. They come in flavors. Among many possible flavors, I have identified three that I think are most pressing and frequent: personal sadness, world sadness, and the sadness of passing away.

Personal sadness means sadness that is particular to one’s own life. It could be an illness or death in the family. It could be a financial crisis, an inability to pay the rent, or the loss of a home. For some people—though not me, thankfully–it could be losing a job, splitting up with a spouse or partner, or dealing with a crisis of an adult child. Sometimes it is caused by a natural disaster. The headlines as I write speak of a million Floridians who were completely wiped out by Hurricane Ian, who had no flood insurance, and who have lost everything. Can you imagine how those people must feel? I have tried to imagine it but failed. It is too awful. Times of personal sadness are, I think, a universal condition of being alive, of being human. But some personal tragedies are not just cruel twists of fate. Some are caused by the selfishness and greed of other people, people in power. Those may be the worst because, in a more perfect world, they would be preventable. And in our world, it seems they are not and they persist. I have been fortunate. My sadness on waking is not often personal. If anything, when I think of my personal circumstances, I am grateful.

That leads to the second flavor: world sadness. Regardless of the circumstances of my life, even though things might be going swimmingly for me, elsewhere in the world there is always some ongoing catastrophe—a war, an oppressive regime, a centuries-old legacy of injustice or poverty, an epidemic—I don’t need to write the list, you can imagine it. The more you tune into the news the more you know about all these events; and these days the constant bombardment of the news is light years removed from the old days of town criers, print newspapers, and local gossip. World sadness seeps in through the cracks, everywhere, even though you may try to shut it out. World sadness is like a loud pounding that never stops. What I feel when I face world sadness is frustration. I see all that is happening and I know that much of it could be assuaged or prevented—like climate change–and there seems to be nothing I or any single individual can do about it. The handmaiden of world sadness is helplessness. You have to work hard to overcome that helpless feeling.

When it comes to world sadness, it’s hard to know whether it is improving or getting worse. Some, like psychologist Stephen Pinker, would like to say the overall condition of humanity has improved. Perhaps when you assess it by measures like life expectancy or multitudes killed in a war, it has. But somehow it doesn’t feel that way. I have a suspicion that in all the ways that matter, world sadness is the same, or even increasing. As just one example, recently one third of Pakistan flooded and was underwater. Tens of millions lost their land, their livelihood, or even their lives, yet it seemed to be in news for only a couple of days. They say it is because of climate change, but other equally damning catastrophes quickly pushed it out of the headlines. I tell myself that if I don’t read so much news I won’t feel so bad, but that seems like cheating to me. Then I would feel like I am turning away from the state of the world just to assuage my state of mind. That doesn’t seem right either.

The sadness of passing away—the third flavor I feel–means that everything we know and love, including our precious selves, will pass away and disappear all too soon. This sadness grows with age. I am 75, and though I am presently in good health, friends my age or younger are taking ill or passing away. I visit their sickbeds; I attend their funerals; sometimes I give their eulogies. The sadness of passing away can overtake you at any age—it really can–but it is more poignant when you are older. Every morning when my wife and I awaken we give silent thanks that there hasn’t been an emergency in the night, something that sends us to the hospital at 2 am. That has already happened to us a couple of times recently; luckily, these events turned out to be false alarms. But you never know.

I think most of the time what I feel when I wake up sad is world sadness, the human condition of sadness. It seems that happiness and sadness come and go, rise and fall, like the tides. I am a Buddhist and believe with Buddhism that this is the shape and texture of life itself. From birth to death, it is as though we are all on a boat. The boat rises and falls as it rides the waves and sails the sea. Its beauty—if we could call it that—is that, like a flower, it is fragile and yet survives. But while we breathe there is always some element of hope; this is my faith. While we are alive there is hope. As one of my Buddhist teachers liked to say, in every breath, there are new chances.

Breathing out, we expire, and some flavor of sadness expires with us. Breathing in, we inspire, and inspiration uplifts us. I am a musician, and one thing I do when I am sad is play music—often music I have composed myself. For me, anyway, music invokes a special kind of happiness–one with no shadow. Even in the most wretched circumstance, it seems, people still sing.

That is a mystery to ponder.