A nest for sadness What is the feeling we never allow into our lives? What’s the feeling we try to permanently avoid, suppress, or escape as soon as possible? Why are we so afraid of a feeling that we will do everything to keep at a distance? Sadness is almost always read as a bad feeling. We don’t want to be sad, and we don’t want our loved ones to be sad. When sadness appears, we feel an uncomfortable tingle at the edge of our fingers that grows into our arms, reaches our chest, and keeps our body in constant alert. Something is wrong; something needs to change immediately. We want to avoid it, take this pain away as quickly as possible, and we do everything we can to get back to the happiness we felt just a few hours, days, or weeks ago. Most of the methods we use are distractions we already know to be effective for that purpose. Happiness is a complex feeling—do not misunderstand me. Some people never learn how to be happy in their entire lives, even if it is the only goal they pursue. We experiment with many feelings related to happiness: satisfaction, pleasure, joy. There are countless “recipes” for it: success, money, partners. We already know that part. But there always comes a moment in life, usually one we cannot choose, when the carefully constructed system of happiness we’ve built is attacked by a virus we do not understand. Something happens, and we feel our foundational certainties tremble, without words to explain it. Our first instinct is to escape, to reinforce our foundations, to fight back, and reclaim the feeling of control we had when everything in our life seemed under our control. By control, I don’t mean knowing exactly what will happen or understanding every piece of the complex puzzle of daily existence—but having a proper explanation for everything, thinking we understand the reasons and consequences of every act, every signal, every movement. Sadness places us in a state of ignorance about ourselves. We feel uncomfortable, without explanations, uncertain of why or how. Something has gone wrong, and we are exposed to the vulnerability of not knowing how to exist when facing the terrible reality of losing control of our own narrative. Someone or something else is making decisions for us, choices we would not have made, altering the story we were writing about our lives. There’s a famous phrase, attributed to so many people that I can never know who first said it: We are what we do with what has been done to us. We are not defined by the decisions we make when everything is in order, but by how we respond to the unexpected, to forces beyond our control. Sadness is the feeling that confronts us with this reality: life is far wider than our capacity for understanding, and our narrative is linear compared to the vast possibilities of stories in the world. Sadness is the moment when our narrative faces this immensity, and we become conscious of our weakness, our smallness. The point is right there. Sadness is seen as terrible. We clench our fists, press our fingers into our hair, squeeze our eyes, grind our teeth, searching for an explanation that will put everything back in its proper place so we can keep going, smile again, and forget. But sadness is a powerful feeling that travels through the stomach and settles between our lungs, an elephant’s feet pressing on our chest, as my mother always says she feels when something happens to one of us, her children. What would happen if, instead of trying to get rid of it, we remained silent and listened to the small signals of sadness in our bodies—the sound of our muscles crying, our bones trembling in the face of the abyss? Let sadness make a nest in our chest, plant some seeds, and feel how a vine grows, climbing our ribs. It is the tree of sadness, taking root in us if we do not uproot it. It may not be a perfect metaphor, but it is a visual image of how I feel my sadness when I allow it to remain. I experienced something new when I let sadness grow in my chest: like every plant, it eventually dies, but the organic remains feeding the next feeling, like a complete natural cycle, a springtime for the heart. Sadness is not necessarily terrible. From it, a purer kind of happiness can grow, fed by the moisture of deep pain, beyond our awareness, beyond our understanding. A happiness that does not mean constant joy and pleasure but the calm breeze of a summer morning in the mountains, the smile of waking to discover a hand wrapped around our hips. A quiet happiness that allows pleasure, joy, and excitement, but is not based on them—just on the conscious understanding that there is no answer or reason for everything, and we will never be able to write a definitive version of our own life. Sadness is, if not necessary, at least real. We choose what to do with it. My dad once told me—I was sixteen, just broken-hearted for the first time—that a man matures when he knows how to live love, sex, and loneliness: in other words, partnership, pleasure, and sadness. I remember this whenever I feel sad and ask myself: How do I live in this moment? I cry, I avoid it with distractions. But sometimes I allow myself to swim trough the sea of sadness till reach the deepest place of it, just to discover that it is not a realm of misery and desolation but a quiet place, a fertile soil where to sow new peach trees to sleep underneath them in summer. I often think in images when reflecting on the happiness that grows from deep sadness. There is a poem by Pescetti (translated from Spanish): (…) everything we can do together Together And naked. That is the other thing I wanted to tell you. Like trees preparing themselves for autumn. Getting dressed with their own nudity. Carrying dry foil until there is no more. Preparing their loving wedding with the autumn that is -suspend all wordplays- The nest for spring. Spring does not arrive But from the remnants of the old, and I cannot see any spring In front of us (…) If someone waits for spring, If after summer, Someone waits again for spring, I’ll let them know It is going to smell rotten. A rotten happiness—a happiness that does not come from autumn. Sadness is like the autumn of our soul, the moment when everything dies to allow something new to be born. There’s also a poem by Beatriz Vignolo I love: And I go I don’t know if happy Or calm Or sad. And a Roland Barthes quote: Plaisir is not far from tedium. It is tedium watched from the coast of bliss. Barthes’ bliss is close to our sadness. From plaisir, constant joy and pleasure, bliss is confused with tedium. But it is from tedium, from sadness, that we discover something new, something unseen before—not necessarily an answer, but a question worth pursuing, a reason to keep searching, to stay awake. I remember reading a lot of articles about how this system want us to be sad. There is a beautiful concept in Deleuze, the idea of a free and joyful individual that fight against the passion of sadness to increase their potency (I may say, I read it in Spanish and the concepts are translated in my brain probably with that interference). I always loved that concept, but there is also another face of it. That passion of sadness is covered by tons of constant smiles, powerful colours, pink and yellow and green, by pleasures that reach our skin but never get into there, never burns our bones. We create a constant fake-happiness distraction to cover the deep a constant sadness. A rotten happiness that is the cover of a deep sadness fighting always to find room in our chest to place. A sadness that is never allows to rest, grow, blossom and die. Yes, I read a lot of articles about the sadness we are living in, but I do not remember reading much about the mandatory happiness we are forced to live in, a happiness without a place for pain. They are both faces of the same coin. It is a rotten happiness, a happiness that doesn’t grow in fertile soil but in the water contained in the basin created with two hands together—a water that soaks through the fingers, leaving our existence dry and dead. We do not have time to suffer, no time to cry. Not time to let small things grow, not time to watch how a drop falls on the green leaf of a plant and permeates down to the roots. I mix metaphors and ideas in this essay—sadness is a virus, a tree, autumn—but I’m not trying to build a perfect analogy. These are the images that emerge when I allow sadness to grow. I close my eyes and feel the burning muscles in my arms, the wet path of a tear, the heaviness in my chest. I feel the leaves falling and see the yellow landscape inside me—and I am no longer afraid. Spring always comes.