Joy and Sadness

I am a series of patterns, patterns that change and evolve through experience.

I've been more diligent with my practice as of lately and as a result I've opened myself up to a state of vulnerability, a state that I used to fear, one I avoided consciously and subconsciously. These days I can embrace it, I can accept it, I can live in it and see it for what it is. Yesterday my mom showed me a picture that my aunt had sent to her, it was of me, my sister, and my father who passed last August. He was sitting down and holding us both, I was maybe 1 and my sister 2. It's a beautiful picture, I'm getting emotional just writing about it. I've noticed it's easier for me to accept sadness as my state than it is to accept joy, joy seems so fragile, something that can be lost and taken away so easily, so there's always a fear in being in it. It's difficult to write about, it's difficult to think coherently. Being in an intense emotional state is conducive for seeing the truth in myself. I can watch it and experience it, feel it for what it's worth. In sadness there's no fear for me, I'm already in what I used to be scared of. Joy was more rare than sadness growing up, fleeting more every time I experienced it, seemingly illusory. As I grew I believed in joy less and less. I systematically found new sources of joy and analyzed them and the experience and would find out why they were illusory and believe less in them. I was very easily disillusioned. I picked apart everything until there was no joy left in anything. I suspected almost every person promoting joy to be a charlatan. I thought that if you had had the capacity to feel sadness and let it take over you then you truly weren't a happy person, I thought being happy meant nothing could tear you apart. When supposed happy people would show any weakness I would conclude that those people were just as weak as me, they don't know the secret to happiness as they represent. If I had admired this person and looked to them for an answer I didn't have then I would dismiss them, see them as just another sad, weak person and move on; and yet to the people who were visibly more weak and sad than myself I would try to appear as if I was the poster boy for happiness. Sadness was my go to growing up, it felt like the only way to really connect to anyone. I developed a nose for sadness and vulnerability in others. But I mainly wanted people to feel sad for me, pity is how I got my love a lot of the time. I wanted a protector. Very early in life I began to believe I wasn't capable of much. It was easier for me to back down and have someone more secure take the hard part. I felt strength in being acquainted with the strong. I didn't see strength in myself as a possibility, and ultimately I was scared of the idea. It implied responsibility, responsibility implied the possibility of failure, the possibility of failure implied the possibility of disapproval and abandonment from everyone I loved. I feel compelled as an adult who has practised emotional control to be strong for those around me, I spent many years doing the opposite as a young boy, I wanted people to see how bad I had it, so in a weird way they'd see my strength, I wanted them to think that I had dealt with so much turmoil and I was still hanging on. I wanted people to see my weakness, but really I wanted them to see why I was weak, I wanted them to understand, that's all it really was, I just wanted to be understood. I gravitated to strong people, people who were revered and admired by others, I knew people listened to them and I wanted them to represent me, to protect me; so when others attacked me, when others talked about me and my weakness, I wanted my strong friends to basically say "Yah he's got a real good reason for that, if you went through what he did you'd be fucked up too." It still feels good to be protected, when people look out for me, it makes me feel loved, but now there's a part of me that's only had real strength for a short time and that part wants to be equal with the strong, be able to protect myself and protect others who require it. I realize now that there is no one way to be, to be always strong and protective or to be always vulnerable and protected, both are necessary, the capacity for both. I thought for many years starting in my teens that I should be strong all the time and my weakness needed to go, so I suppressed it, I made myself believe I was strong. I cried a lot as a boy, and somewhere around 14 or 15 years old I got blocked up, as far as I remember I stopped altogether, I was done being weak, if my memory serves me I don't believe I shed a tear from about 15 to 22. I thought that that was what being strong was all about, real men don't cry. I sometimes mocked the weak in others, I didn't respect it because I was afraid to face the weakness in myself. As a result I was uncomfortable for a lot of that time. There was a tension, an uneasiness that I combated by seeking approval, more so admiration, I wanted people to believe that I had it all figured out; a friend once said that to me, when I was about 19, that it seemed like I had life figured out. I took this to heart, it only solidified my desire to be and be seen as always happy, to be better than those who were too weak to figure it out for themselves. I had to accept a lot of sad truths as a boy and in doing this it gave me the idea that I could handle anything, I was strong like a rock, but that was just my shell, my shell was rock hard, but like the earth, there was an inside of hot molten lava constantly moving, and if something were to penetrate the surface of my persona I would just fall apart and spill out everywhere, losing all structure. In my mid twenties, I began to really feel that lava, I could no longer deny its existence, I was not happy, I was good at being happy, but it wasn't who I was. Realizing all this, seeing it and understanding it but not identifying with it is what grants me the ability to know happiness now. Happiness is not what I believed it to be, it is essentially a state without fear or desire. To feel joy and not worry if it will go away or when it will come back again, but to just feel it and appreciate it while it's there. To be able to feel sadness and not have the fear and panic that it will never go away, to understand its beauty, to know that feeling sadness is a reflection of empathy, an indication that we can feel for each other, we are not alone. 

Today I can look at that picture of my father and be overwhelmed with sadness, I can imagine the last time we hugged, the smile he had on his face when he saw me and I can cry the tears and be ok. Now instead of panic and fear I just feel love for him, I feel connected to him, and I don't feel without him. I know that he as a physical body is no more, but I know that love is what is permanent, that he loved me and I loved him, so our love for each other is not gone, it is the only thing that is infinite, it exists always in the consciousness of the universe that we are as a whole, I know that my father and I were just two different manifestations of the universe, just playing the game of life with each other, so we can teach and learn from one another about love. Thinking about my father can sadden me, but it does not depress me, I am not doing or being less than what I can be because I miss him, if anything the idea of him and the love we share is one of the factors that motivates me to explore my full potential, and for that I am eternally grateful.