About a week back, it suddenly struck me that all the poetry I write is always the grave and sad kind, like ALL of it, and the thought didn't really make me happy. I wondered if I was so sad inside that all I wrote was morose and contemplative. Then I tried to write something happy, and it was kinda positive initially, but became serious towards the end. It felt somehow that sadness is deeper than happiness; all the poems that I love are the sad kinds too. And then I was telling a friend about the theory that cold and darkness are not really entities, as they refer to conditions where their more substantial opposites are absent; heat and light respectively. [Cold is not really something that exists, it's just a name for the time when there's less heat.]
Then the idea struck me that probably sadness is the real thing and happiness is just a condition where there's less sadness. Because, sometimes on the face of it, you might be feeling happy, or feel what you think is happiness, but as soon as you go deeper, think about some stuff, think about your aging grandparents, or the rising unemployment levels, or even the poor salaries of policemen, there's only sadness. So happiness is this shallow, on-the-surface concept, which comes and goes, and when you do remove its thin layer, you'll find sadness; and it's sadness that doesn't go, it stays, always, under every feeling. Sounds about right, no?
Then the idea struck me that probably sadness is the real thing and happiness is just a condition where there's less sadness. Because, sometimes on the face of it, you might be feeling happy, or feel what you think is happiness, but as soon as you go deeper, think about some stuff, think about your aging grandparents, or the rising unemployment levels, or even the poor salaries of policemen, there's only sadness. So happiness is this shallow, on-the-surface concept, which comes and goes, and when you do remove its thin layer, you'll find sadness; and it's sadness that doesn't go, it stays, always, under every feeling. Sounds about right, no?
1 comment:
I agree. But there's a flipside to it also. Like everytime you're feeling sad, you think of all the good things. Like the fact that you have a good family, friends, education, blah blah. So it's like there's so much to keep you happy but then you have spells of darkness.
I mean both the sides of the argument are equally convincing for me.
In dramatics, one of our mentors once taught us to do method acting. Like you take an hour off and get into character. I asked why he always asked us to feel angry or sad. And then he tried explaining it to me. It's like the sad scale is -1 to -10. And the happy is 1-10. Our general state is usually around a 3. It's easier coming to a 10 than going to a -10. But most humans are naturally self-pitying, so we're more prone to go from a 3 to a -10.
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