It may strike when I am nursing a hangover or on a quiet Wednesday evening when I have accomplished all my tasks. Engaged in the mundane chores of washing dishes or brushing my teeth, I try to find some coherence in my life’s story, but it evades me. Memories of events are scattered, faces blurred. In vain, I struggle to recall the last time I felt truly happy, but there is nothing wrong.
Desperately seeking a reason, my mind scurries to find a cause. Did I drink enough water? Did I talk to anyone today? Is the weather gloomy? The dark, sinking feeling deep in my gut spirals, seeping into every inch of my being. I feel inexplicably sad.
Vincent van Gogh aptly captured this emotion, writing, “one feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.”
I feel trapped, adrift in aimless desolation. My attempts to imagine a better future are swiftly crushed by my talent for pessimism. Seeing a friend reminds me of how much happier they are than I am. Watching a favorite movie, once a source of joy, now reminds me of better times. Even a simple walk in the park feels like a futile display of my miserable self. Why would anyone want to see the ugly, sad me?
I search for the root of my despair, but there is no single cause. Perhaps it is the accumulation of minor moments of loneliness, regret, shame, and failure that weigh me down.
Does my life, as a whole, amount to an abyss of misery?
Or maybe, in a more charitable light, these intermittent periods of sadness are simply the darker shades of a beautiful and complex masterpiece.
Poet Mary Ruffle classified sadness into different colors.
Orange sadness is the anxiety and worry that weigh us down, like an orange balloon drifting over snow-capped mountains or the sadness of wild goats.
Green sadness is the sadness of graduation, the sadness of a bright June day or a shiny new toaster emerging from its box.
Maybe the sadness with no reason falls under Ruffle’s category of gray sadness, the most common of all sadnesses. Gray sadness is the melting snowman in a snowstorm, nonsensical yet beautiful, and, most importantly, replaceable. The reason behind this sadness shifts, but its essence remains pure. The gray hue adds depth and shading to our greater memories, reminding us of the significance of our cherished moments that all come to an end eventually.
Do we refuse to see the beauty and purpose in a song simply because it ends?
Perhaps my sadness serves the most important role of all: to maintain form through emptiness, honor in transience, love, and finality. I realize that my happiness requires these intermissions of unhappiness, lest I fall into the monotony of dull contentment.
Like the seasons, this too shall pass, playing an important role in the ebb and flow of our lives. Just as winter makes way for spring’s new life, our sadness provides an opportunity to mourn and move past all that has left us. It is a chance to lovingly empty our souls, to be stripped down again to the bare essentials of what truly matters.
You cannot refuse winter, nor can you deny your feelings. The word “depress” comes from “depression,” rooted in the act of pushing something down. So, the necessary step is to ask yourself: what feeling are you unwilling to feel?
Let yourself feel sad, and soon you may recognize that this ambiguous monolithic emotion we call sadness is, in reality, a subtle and varied experience of tones and hues, both light and dark, that offers us further insight into whatever it is that we’re actually doing here.
中文版：无缘由之悲伤