Are you ever left wondering why it is that you can experience both happiness and sadness in a single moment? Life is a roller coaster of highs and lows, but what you may not realize is that whatever you are happy about there is a correlating factor contributing to your sadness – and whatever you are sad about there is a correlating factor contributing to your happiness.
Life is filled with a balance between highs and lows and it’s with this thought in mind that we should approach every experience.
Think of it this way – every hello has its goodbye, every glory has its suffrage, every love story has its heartache.
Throughout my life, I have grown accustomed to compartmentalizing certain aspects of my life. From the day my mum flew across the Atlantic Ocean while eight months pregnant with me, I have more or less lived a bi-continental lifestyle.
Germany and Canada are both my homelands and for this, I am very grateful.
However, it has and continues to be a push/pull dynamic between the two – missing one whilst being in the other. Feeling happy my feet are touching German soil yet sad I’m not breathing in the fresh Canadian air… specifically the salty West Coast ocean air. Ironically, as I type these words I’m mid-air from Germany to Canada. My love for these two countries runs through my veins. I started to realize that being sad in this regard isn’t necessarily negative. Perhaps this sadness is reflecting an appreciation for what I’ve been blessed with.
What if the people, places or things we feel a sense of sadness or melancholy towards are the shadow side of our happiness? If we avoid putting ourselves out in the world through the accumulation of experiences aka FULLY living our lives because we fear the accompanied uncomfortable emotions then in itself, we are avoiding the beauty of depth and nuance life has to offer. This is after all the human experience. By creating more awareness of the balance between joy and darkness we can manifest a reality within our dreams. We can fill our lives with a purpose that radiates light out into the world and brings forward inner peace and happiness even amongst the melancholy.
Relationships are the greatest example of this dance between light and dark. And by relationships I mean friendships, familial, romantic or platonic. Think back to a goodbye you said to someone you love and cherish deeply. There might have been a reluctance for the appending farewell, maybe even to the point where it brought tears to your eyes. It can feel sad, lonely and uncomfortable. But once we begin to peel back the layers of these seemingly negative emotions we begin to discover that what is nestled within are feelings of love, connection and happiness. The intertwining of these two opposites provides us with an understanding of the depth of love within the relationship which inevitably caters to its strength. Coming back to my first point – the sadness I feel when saying a long goodbye to a friend or close family member directly correlates to the level of happiness I feel in their presence and the level of joy my relationship with them provides me. The emotions I express outwardly may at times say otherwise but the feelings are coming from my heart centre.
By remaining in pursuit of fending off negative emotions in an attempt to harvest more positive emotions we ironically enough invite more of the unwanted. Emotions are here to be felt and we cannot have one without the other. Contrast adds richness – if we humans felt nothing less than happiness and joy could we even understand what it means to savour and enjoy? It is through feelings of sadness and loss that we gain an appreciation for the simplicity in happiness and the comfort in joy. The co-existance of light and dark in our lives harmoniously define the scope to which we love and live the human experience.
P.S. I understand and fully recogonize the severity of mental health issues and how those individuals who are battling such or have battled can experience more darker days than light. I have full symptathy and respect in this regard. The point of this essay is not to question mental health issues but merely to invite curiosity around the emotions regarding happiness and sadness that each of us feel.
