On Down Days Last week was a pretty down week for me. Both in terms of the emotional energy I pulled out of it and in the amount of mental energy I put into it. I pride myself on rolling through life relatively staidly, coasting through the bumps and bends without taking too much of anything to heart, so it felt strange to have this heaviness hit me and to have to acknowledge that sometimes I can’t just roll out the other side unscathed. Sometimes you have to sit with emotions. While its more enjoyable to hold on to happiness, I’d suggest its infinitely easier to sit with sadness. Sadness rises up to meet you and you sink into it, and where an emotion like joy needs to be fed and re-fed to maintain itself, sadness tends to feed itself in a self-fulfilling cycle. The sadder you feel the more you feel like retreating, the more you retreat the sadder you feel. I had a very physical response to this emotion, spending five days sinking into the couch with a book and a coffee. At any other period in the last thirty years this would have felt luxurious, but this time it just felt a little lonesome because it wasn’t self-imposed, it was thrust upon me by the wider world. Continue reading “On Down Days”