Sadness – Is it only a temporary phase in One’s life?
By
Dr. RGS
Asthana
Senior
Member IEEE
As
per WikipediA, “Sadness is emotional pain associated with, or characterized
by feelings of disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment
and sorrow. An individual experiencing sadness may become
quiet or lethargic, and withdraw himself
Figure
above depicts a vocabulary wheel wherein at its centre Robbs has identified six
important emotions or feelings in life i.e. happiness, sadness, disgust, anger,
fear and surprise. Although, Robbs drew
this wheel with a different aim but the words in each of the quadrant really
depict feelings or emotions in one’s life.
We
can consider a very simple view of life which is composed of two emotions only
i.e. either being happy or sad.
Therefore, sadness and happiness are two facets of the same coin and may
be its edges refer to the transitions (which may include the other feelings described
in the wheel). The coin here symbolizes life and happiness, sadness,
transitions and neutral phase can come in any order as well as repeat them
again and again in one’s life. Please
note that this hypothesis is used only as an example. However, in one’s life
the distribution of sadness, happiness and other feelings varies and is not
evenly distributed. It, in fact, is how
one looks at a half glass of water as
half full or half empty glass or the glass has 50% water and rest air i.e. its
full of water and air and is never empty.
This may, however, only help in determining whether one is optimistic or
pessimistic. Classifying people in two
classes only is partially incorrect as there will always be some grey area. If one learns to live only in the vicinity of
present, i.e. one is not busy thinking about his past or future, one is likely
to live his life peacefully as sadness like happiness is too only a state of
mind. Some say and is true also to a
great extent that one learns from the past, plan the future and live present to
the full.
It’s
an anomaly that given the same situation someone may be happy and someone
sad. There is a saying that if someone
feels happy on a small positive event then there is every possibility that he
will feel sad too on a small negative event. The solution therefore, is to
train oneself to ignore small positive and small negative events and let life
move on. However, there will be
situations when everyone will be sad. It’s normal. Sadness is a very important emotion because
it can help you motivate and help to do something about a distressing
situation. You may feel sad for many reasons, like:
a. You have been disappointed
“Never let yesterday's
disappointments overshadow tomorrow's dreams.”
~Unknown
Disappointment
is one of life’s most uncomfortable feelings. It is feeling of disgust. It, in
fact, includes other emotions like anger, hurt, sadness, and probably many
others too subtle to identify. Sometimes, those emotions by themselves are
easier to deal with, but disappointment can leave one at a loose end.
Given
below are four ways to get rid of disappointment:
1. Let it
out.
Genuinely experiencing emotions, no
matter how painful, is one of the beauties of life. Don’t shy away from these
moments. Be present in them.
2. Get some
perspective of the situation.
The main advantage of letting it out is
that one has given oneself some time to experience ones (his) feelings of
disappointment. Once one has done that,
it becomes much easier to get some perspective of the situation.
Perhaps the person who one feels
disappointed by doesn’t even realize/know that they’ve done something to upset him
(someone). Maybe they’re stressed out and don’t have the emotional bandwidth to
think about it because they aren’t allowing themselves time to experience their
emotions.
Rushing onto gaining perspective before
one has allowed oneself to be with how he(one) feels will be artificial and
will not last.
3. Know your
own heart.
Disappointment can ripple through to the
core of who you are. If you don’t know what your core values are, you may not
have a framework to support you when you experience negative emotions.
4. Practice
acceptance.
As human beings, even though we know that
some things are bound to happen, we’re not always willing to accept them. Every time one is disappointed, one (he) feels
overwhelmed by one’s (his) emotions. One is inclined to withdraw and blame others,
wanting to wallow in one’s disappointment. Each time, one has to accept that one
(he) will feel these things again.
b.
You
have been ignored
Being left out by a group of friends is really
painful for people of all ages. Even though everyone experiences rejection
sometimes, being left out can make one (you) feel lonely and sad. To cope with
being left out, there are several things that one(you) can do, including
understanding why you feel the way that you do, encouraging yourself, and
talking to your friends about your feelings. Please do always remember that your
feelings are just as important as everyone else's.
c.
You
have been misunderstood
This point is best
described by the following quote:
“Sensitive people are the most genuine
and honest people you will ever meet. There is nothing they won’t tell you
about themselves if they trust your kindness. However, the moment you betray
them, reject them or devalue them, they become the worse type of person.
Unfortunately, they end up hurting themselves in the long run. They don’t want
to hurt other people. It is against their very nature. They want to make amends
and undo the wrong they did. Their life is a wave of highs and lows. They live
with guilt and constant pain over unresolved situations and misunderstandings.
They are tortured souls that are not able to live with hatred or being hated.
This type of person needs the most love anyone can give them because their soul
has been constantly bruised by others. However, despite the tragedy of what
they have to go through in life, they remain the most compassionate people
worth knowing, and the ones that often become activists for the broken hearted,
forgotten and the misunderstood. They are angels with broken wings that only
fly when loved.”
d.
You
haven't achieved your goals
The
answer to this is, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!” So one needs to learn being tough – easy said
than done.
It
may be noted that during the course of one’s life – everyone experiences
rejection, disappointment and/or failure from time to time. But one trait
which sets tough people apart from some others is that, when tough people do
get knocked down, they always get back up again. Not only that but when
they get back up, they become stronger, having learned as much from the
experience as they can. So learning from
past experience and applying the learning when one faces a similar situation
again - is key to do better.
One needs to learn as
much as one can from any possible failures; as these really are excellent
learning opportunities and these can be used as a blessing in disguise.
And it's always important to focus on the future rather than dwell on the
past. If at first one does not succeed, try, try again!
In the park where I go
for morning walks, I see an 88 years old person walking with a stick. He does
walk about 180 metres in 12 minutes but meets his goal anyway merely through
extreme perseverance.
Parents wish that
their siblings should become doctor or engineer or IAS or IPS when they grow up
and thus unknowingly put pressure on the little ones. This wish somehow gets injected into the
siblings and with time this wish does become the goal in minds of the siblings. However, when sibling grow up and do not
become or likely to become what their parents wanted it becomes a major concern
and leads to sadness. There are cases
when siblings have even committed suicide because of this known parental
pressure. The solution is to be happy with whatever one becomes as there is
every opportunity to excel in whatever field one is. Please see example of Ms. Arunima Sinha given
in the section e. of this paper where she performed much beyond expectations of
her parents irrespective of the circumstances.
e.
You
lose something important to you like a loved one or your self-confidence
This
group of events refer to an important issue and everyone feels sad. However,
e.g., if one loses a relative the sadness quantum and its duration is directly
proportional to the closeness of the relative.
The sadness thus caused is temporary in nature and this phenomenon
applies to other items in the group too.
One needs to accept that there are things that one can't change. Once
this realization occurs the sadness slowly fades away.
Here is a true story of Ms. Arunima
Sinha (born 1988). She was a national level volleyball player and was
pushed from a running train by thieves in 2011 while she was resisting them. As
a result, one of her legs had to be amputated below the knee.
Think
of a scenario and level of sadness one encounters when one sees one’s leg cut
by a running train and one is lying on the railway track in totally helpless
situation. I was recently seeing Arunima’s interview on the TV and she was
explaining this scenario. As per her
narration, when she gained consciousness she saw her leg already cut by another
train running on the parallel track and she was profusely bleeding. She has to
face the situation so she gathered some extra courage and walked with lot of
difficulty along the track till some villagers saw her and took her to the
Bareilly hospital. Her brother came there. He was extremely sad but she asked
him to get best prosthetic fitted so that she can walk again. The appropriate
prosthetic was fitted by the doctors in the hospital. This is a story which depicts extreme sadness
and shows exemplarily courage by a person.
While dealing with pitying murmurs of,
“Who will marry you now,” and the absurd conspiracy theories that followed, she
made a decision. She would climb Mount Everest. In 2013, she did just that,
becoming the world’s first female amputee, and the first Indian amputee, to
achieve this feat.
Conclusion
Here is an interesting corporate
story. Once, a CEO of an organization announced
in a gathering of all his officers that finally the most negative person in the
company who did lot of harm to the company has died. He said that all officers
can come one-by-one and take last look at the person. As people passed through they noticed that
the CEO has put a mirror in the coffin and everyone saw his face in the
coffin. The moral of the story is that
one really does not know when he has become negative harming the organization
as a result.
The second story is about a kid who was
holding two apples in his tiny hands.
His father asked him for an apple.
But he took a bite from an apple while his father was observing. Then he took byte from the other apple and
his father was visibly unhappy. However,
then the kid offered one apple to his father saying that this one is sweeter.
So the take from this example is that
sometime action is unimportant and could be deceptive from the motive of the
person. It is, therefore, a good practise to take time in arriving at a
decision.
The morale of this story is that a
staircase is a means for going up as well as to come down. It’s your choice
what you wish to do.
It is a known fact that sadness is only a
temporary phase in one’s life which can easily be overcome perseverance,
courage and determination. Sadness may come many times in one’s life but
solution always remains the same. The same applies to happiness too but then
one is, generally, not bothered.
