Our Human Experience: That Sometimes Inexplicable Sadness

Throughout almost all of my life I have periodically been beset by overwhelming sadness.

I'll be sitting there, just minding my own business and doing whatever it is I'm doing in the course of a day... then all of a sudden I feel incredibly sad.

Sometimes the sadness is triggered by a memory; maybe I saw something on a website or in a book or in a magazine that reminded me of a time gone by. Sometimes the sadness happens spontaneously for seemingly no reason… other than maybe a passing thought that went through my brain as I was doing something completely unrelated.

I've met relatively few people in my life — to be honest, I can count them on one hand — who told me they experience something similar. I have no real explanation for it. I do remember being a kid and spontaneously feeling inclined to burst into tears even though I had nothing whatsoever to be sad about.

Some people might point to depression, but I have been screened by doctors many times in my life, and depression is not the issue.

For lack of a better explanation, I tend to attribute these feelings to being a Highly Sensitive Person (or HSP) as a result of which I tend to experience things very deeply and intensely.

In the past, I have mentioned the Japanese cultural concept ”mono no aware” which is impossible to translate into English, but roughly means something along the lines of ”the slight sadness one feels as something happens and we realize that it will never happen again.”

That's actually a hopelessly inadequate translation but it is an honoring of the impermanence of everything and a sensitivity to the pathos of things. We treasure the beauty of a tree with magnificent fall foliage and yet also reflect wistfully on the passage of a season.

It's usually at this point where people look at me slightly wide eyed and tell me that I ”think too much.” I often wonder what ”thinking too much” really means. An awful lot of the time, it strikes me that it mostly means the people are trying to actively avoid feelings that are anything other than positive. So ”You’re thinking too much!” actually is code-speak for ”I don't want to experience feelings that go with having those thoughts.”

On some level, I do understand what they mean. I understand what it means when somebody says ”I can't handle being sad,” because I am able to relate to that statement by wrapping a context around it from my own life, which would be ”I can't handle being angry.”

We all have our things; our idiosyncrasy's; our uncomfortable emotions; things we'd rather forget about. Fortunately, sudden sadness is not one of those, for me...

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

How about YOU? Do you feel things very strongly... including sadness? Do you sometimes wonder where the feelings COME from? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 20210528 23:42 PDT
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