Sadness is a seducer. So is grief.
An email arrives, or a piece of news we did not want, and before we even understand what has happened, something in us starts to stir. Quiet and familiar. We find ourselves disoriented, confused.
There is something almost calming in it, if we are honest. The pull of it feels like being drawn under, gently, the way a current takes hold before we even notice. We could stay there a long while. Roll in it, really. Let the whole day belong to that grief instead of to us.
We know that pull. Most of us do. We have given entire days to it before, entire seasons, without even considering we were deciding for it.
And then, sometimes, something in us simply notices. It doesn’t fight or argue. Just notices. Oh. I am doing this again. I do not actually want to spend today here.
And the strange thing is, once we see it, it starts to loosen on its own. Not because we did anything to it. Because we stopped doing anything with it at all.
We believe, so many of us, that our sensations have power over us. That grief, once it arrives, must be handled somehow, managed, understood, fixed, or it will simply take us. But a sensation in the body has no power of its own. What gives it power is the meaning we hang on it, the story we build around it, the purpose we quietly assign it. The moment we stop deciding what a feeling means, and simply let it move, we find that it does move. Like a river. Feelings rise in us the way little fish jump up and break the surface, and they go back down again, and the river carries on being the river. Nothing needs to be touched. Nothing needs to be meddled with.
We are so afraid of something that, left alone, has no power at all.
And underneath that fear is something older. We think we have to do, in order to be. Fix, regulate, master, rewrite ourselves into someone worth being. So many of us spend our whole lives doing to fix what was never actually broken, waiting for a finally I’ll become that never quite arrives.
We hand our identity to our stories so easily. We meet someone new and tell them who we are by telling them what happened to us. Our heartbreaks, our losses, the things that nearly undid us. This is what made me who I am, we say, and we mean it kindly, but somewhere in there we become an accumulation of our stories instead of the ones living them. Like reaching for a dimmer switch on something too bright to bear, and turning our own light down without noticing we did it. We forget what we actually were before we ever arrived here.
I understand the pull of it, truly. There is something in us that would rather keep the story, even a devastating one, than imagine ourselves as something larger. The story feels like proof that we exist. Give it up, and what is there? That question is the real seducer, more than any grief or sadness ever was.
I think this is the deeper root of it, if we keep going. We would rather hold our particular pain than hold nothing at all. That grip, more than the pain itself, is where most of our suffering actually lives.
I am not saying any of this from some place of having it finished. I gave years of my life to this question, and I still catch myself. I still trip, still forget, still go, oh, I really got stuck in that one again. That is simply what it is to be human and always changing, always coming back up, the way a seed keeps pushing toward the sun whether we remember planting it or not.
The sensations were never the enemy. The stories were never the enemy. Nothing here is broken, and nothing here needs repairing. There is only this quiet, ongoing seeing, and the allowing that follows it, and underneath all of it, still and unmoved, the self that was never missing to begin with.
We do not have to go down into the waves to prove they are real. We only have to notice we are standing on the shore, watching them rise and fall, and remember we were always the one watching. There we are. There we are again, showing up in these bright, beautiful ways, in this life.