My Defining Sadnesses

I am, on a relatively frequent basis, sad. It is not typically the result of anything in particular that has happened to me or anyone I know–anything bad, that is. Nor is it (as far as I can tell) because I am depressed or anything like that. On the contrary, in my life right now there is such an undercurrent of joy (and, though not related, an absence of real hardship) that I am certainly neither unhappy (unfortunate) nor depressed. The feeling or emotion I am describing is maybe then not best named “sadness”. But in any case, I’ll say what it is like, and you can call it what you will (it just occurred to me to call it “nostalgia”, and that is a pretty good capture except for the connotation of remembering things being involved).

Basically, there are times when I feel that my heart gets so heavy, so full (don’t think of these things as contradictory), that I am unable to contain any more of what it is full with, and it has to be released in the form of some emotion. For me the appropriate emotion has always seemed to be sadness, or whatever you call it when tears come. So on the outside, it looks as if I am sad about something, when really the case is that the sadness is just my involuntary response to the depth, or the power, or the reality, or (especially) the beauty of whatever it is that I am thinking about or looking at or pondering. I suppose that for others, the emotional response might be different. Maybe it is excitement, or maybe it is frustration. For me, it is sadness (i.e., the appearance of it).

I noticed recently that there are really only a few things which make me feel this way. Themes, I guess you could call them, and they recur with frequency. I rarely come upon them immediately or intentionally, but typically after pondering or considering something unrelated. Oftentimes I’ll be reading a book and realize that I’ve been skimming for a few paragraphs, not really comprehending any words, and suddenly my heart is off on one of these themes. At that point I’m effectively paralyzed–I have to sit and soak in the experience whether I like it or not, or find it convenient or not. If it happens when I’m around people, I become irritable. Most often, though, it is the result of music. Since this ties into one of the themes itself, I’ll handle the explanation for that later.

So, what are these themes? After a little while’s reflection, I believe there are 4 main ones, but, as you will see, they are all really connected. I’m not sure what the nature of the connection is; is it hierarchical or is it a flat network? I don’t know. But here they are, my defining sadnesses:

Not having found my one female companion

Don’t laugh–it’s true, and it is the theme that has been most in my mind recently (of the four), and I’ll probably write most about it here. Now, remember what I said earlier, I am not sad in the unfortunate/unhappy sense when I think about my singleness. Rather, I believe that I am having an entirely fruitful life experience, and especially in my human relationships, what with the incredible family and friends that constantly surround me. No, the sense is somewhat more general, almost unrelated to my life per se.

There is something deep within me that resonates with the concept of a pair of separate yet unified human beings, essentially different in their masculinity and femininity, but pulled together in an ever-deepening dance which traces out the steps of love. I also resonate, as you might have guessed, with Lewis’ imaginative and deeply true and free account of gender in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.

You mustn’t think as a result of that that I hold to any particular way that male and female are or should be related, whether that pertains to spiritual authority or social roles or even whether it is good to marry in the first place. I especially wouldn’t want you to think that I believe this sense I have is necessarily found in every human. No, I can sidestep all those issues; I can even sidestep that fearful Christian question of whether I am supposed to be celibate! I do that because I’m not talking about here about what I think I should do or what I think is good for me or anything like that. Rather, I am describing a part of myself which is core enough to be defining, and that part wholeheartedly embraces the idea of male/female love elucidating God’s love. “It is not good for man to be alone,” just like, apparently, it wasn’t good for God to be alone.

I have had these ideas and desires for that kind of love as long as I can remember. Maybe it was the fact that since before I was born my parents were exhibiting it. Maybe it’s the books I read. Maybe it’s the fantastical nature of those books, with their fairy-tale romances and their insistence that (despite what you might think), love beats out magic any day. Maybe it’s because I learned early on that I could pretty much do whatever I wanted to do, in terms of my abilities, but that all of those things had to do with me. Love requires another person, and to make it good love with that person requires more than brains or physical ability…it requires the heart of Christ.

My relationships, while being mostly disastrous from a certain perspective (and mostly awesome from others, of course)–the perspective of my own maturity (i.e., lack of it)–merely whet my appetite for a healthy and lasting relationship.

Anyway, the point is that after many years, I have decided that the bare fact is that I am made for love. I could be wrong about that, but if I am, it will be a long and painful road to that discovery (so I’m hoping I’m not wrong). In other words, there is a very real sense in which, while I feel completely satisfied in every part of my life, and can’t even think of any real practical benefits to being in a serious relationship at the moment, incompleteness lingers. It is always there in the back of my mind, gently pressuring. I have often mistaken this pressure, which is really just a reflection of my deepest personality in believing it is made for love, for attraction (attraction as including but not limited to physical desire)…which has left me in the embarrassing position several times of realizing that I’m not actually attracted to so-and-so, even though I’ve been telling her this!

Fortunately for me, every other time or so, things “don’t work out” before I come to that realization, and I am spared hurting someone horribly. Still, I myself feel duped (by myself) when I gain enough clarity to realize I was going after someone specific, not for any specific motivations, but because of this general push of my heart, when what (I decided) really warrants a pursuit is a specific push, if that makes sense. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt one of these, but now I’m hoping I’ll be able to recognize it.

So I ponder this often, and the deep roots into my heart the theme has often led me to this melancholic sadness I’m describing (which is all the more poignant when I don’t have any pursuits, like right now).

Not being able to learn all the world’s languages
I just realized this is one of my defining sadnesses this weekend. I was sitting at my desk, working or something, when I glanced up at my bookshelf. As I scanned it I noticed all my “teach-yourself” language books, or grammar references, or whatever, of which I have over 20. My eyes moved from Old English to Welsh to German to Japanese to Hindi to Thai to Portuguese to Latin to Greek to Spanish, and at each stop I felt a slight twinge of, believe it or not, emotional pain.

Maybe it came from remembering the times at which I bought each of those books. I was probably standing in a bookstore in the language section, dreaming of how awesome it would be to know such-and-such a language. I probably picked up the book, flipped through it, thought how easy it would be to read it and work through it in the course of a few months if I just dedicated some time to it, and then dreamed some more about being in a foreign land where I could cut through the foreignness with mutual communication, which means of course mutual educating and inspiring.

But life and responsibilities turned my plans to nothing, and now I sit years later looking at each of these books as a dream that has more or less died. Inevitably, though, the spark of excitement comes back, and I once again slip into my dream world of being able to communicate with everybody. Although, communication per se isn’t exactly what I seem to want; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘s babelfish doesn’t attract me, because it is cheating. Part of being able to communicate with someone is having gone through the process of learning their language, learning the proper context for that communication.

Anyway, the excitement is the pathway to sadness because I know that there is just not enough time in my life to learn even 10 languages, let alone 6,000, let alone the one that I’ve been creating… Not given the enormous amount of other deep interests that I have. The thought that I will die long before I could ever learn all the things I want to know, and create all the things I want to bring into the world, is one of incredible poignancy to me. Again, I don’t think of myself as unfortunate, and of course I realize that the world is this way for everybody, and in fact if it weren’t, who’s to say if I would find anything at all interesting, without time as a limiting factor that gives meaning to choice? Not that I think God hasn’t figured a way through that one; at least I hope he has, or else his Kingdom will be somewhat less than what he promises.

So there is number two–the realization that time limits my fullest expressions of thirst for learning and of creativity.

Loneliness
My third defining sadness is loneliness. This is odd, because I am very rarely lonely, especially now that my dream of living in a loving community which is around all the time is starting to be fulfilled. Nor is it the kind of loneliness that one feels even when tons of other people are around, due to the fact that there is no communication. No, I am not living in a Tokyo apartment building. I have the liberty of sharing my thoughts and feelings with my closest friends (and, apparently, the entire world, on this weblog!), and they have the same.

My next guess was to say that this loneliness I speak of is really just the same as my sadness over not having a girlfriend. Isn’t that a kind of loneliness? Yes indeed, and I think this is one of the ways that these themes are connected. However, it wouldn’t be right to say that the themes are identical. What I mean by loneliness is less lack of company, or female company, and more the shock of my own individuality.

This should make sense, given how I keep harping on the point that these themes which cause “sadness” don’t really have anything to do with anything negative or bad, or any misfortune or any way in which I feel that my life could be better. No, loneliness here is what happens when I realize that, when it really comes down to it, I am myself. It is only me who is me, and I am not anyone else. Obvious, yes, but it means that, at some point, I am going to be some way, and the people I am with are going to be a different way.

The times when my individuality is thus more pronounced are therefore times when I feel that there is a very real distance between me and other people. Moreover, I have this idea that I am different than other people to a higher degree than other people are different than each other. It’s probably a false statement, and certainly only true from several narrow perspectives, but I mean…look at what you are reading! Who writes this kind of weird stuff? A handful of people I can think of. The same goes for a number of things which I hold dear–the books I love, the music I love, the ideas I love, the art I love…more often than not, I find myself in the minority. Oh, and let’s not forget this whole overanalytic melancholiness which is the subject of this entry…for some reason I feel that the number of people who can relate in experience to it is small.

The result of these separations, which usually happens when I am in groups of people, and for whatever reason I get whisked off by a train of my own thought to some place that I don’t think the whole group would want to be, is a sense of homelessness. There is feeling that there is nowhere for me to safely land, because landing is a vulnerable thing and more than likely the current conversation is not an appropriate or understanding place for it.

I am glad, as a little interlude, that I am living in a community one of the purposes of which is ostensibly to intentionally confront feelings and fears like this, and I am anxious to get to the point quickly where we know each other well enough for me to actually experiment with this without fear of pushing people away.

But there it is–all my life I have felt that the thoughts that occupy my time do not occupy the time of those around me, and so I became withdrawn. And just think, this is probably true of everyone in the world, though they might react to it differently…

Beauty

And now we come to the crowning theme, which really pulls the rest together (I now think, after having written all of the previous).

You see, loneliness is beautiful. It is broken and beautiful, but it is beautiful because it is the voltage that allows the electricity of love to move from one person to another. Not being able to learn all the world’s languages is beautiful, because it is a perfect picture of the striving of us humans, the good striving, but the striving that cannot be fulfilled in this world. And finally, romantic heartache is beautiful because it is the art of spirit. It is the Great Art, and it is (to my complete and utter surprise and joy) the same between man and woman as between humans and God. We paint with our hearts as brushes on the canvas of the world, using our very lives as the medium. What is the picture? It is the story of love.

Beauty can move me like no other thing. Sometimes I am so overwhelmed by a beautiful song, a beautiful sunset, a beautiful story, that my heart is pierced through with a cold sliver of eternity, as if eternity itself were caught by surprise and accidentally jumped forward like an eager racehorse, ripping through the fabric of the universe to marvel, forgetting that I am not yet made of the stuff of eternity, and it is too real, so real that it injures me.

The end of a song can leave me reeling from a wound like this…so much beauty that I never want it to end, but yet I know that if it had gone on for two more minutes, I might be permanently marred.

The sight of a beautiful woman also has this power, though I have so conditioned myself to look right through the beauty and to how I can gratify myself via a self-constructed fantasy world, that I am hoping I have not forever lost the purity to see holy art in a woman’s face, instead of my own greed reflected in her eyes.

The absolute hugeness of the universe, the alien and powerful stars and galaxies that surround us, the endless mysteries that we can never hope to plumb, the uncharacterizable motion of the waves under the moon in places where people cannot live, the answering whisper of the trees on the land, the full-throated joy and recklessness of the mountains, the unbounded curiosity of men and women, the colors we see and the eyes we see them with… The world indeed is a dangerous place even to think about, when very nearly everything has a hidden power to display beauty when least expected!

When my heart comes into contact with this beauty, it cannot contain it within itself, and it is released as–a profound sadness that is really a joy that is really a gratitude that is really a love.

Well, that emotion is so complex and so out-of-place in our world of the even-keel and the efficient, that maybe it is no surprise that I have only just pinpointed it as a core part of who I am. But I hope that I will continue to explore what is happening in me, and where these sadnesses come from. Mostly, though, I hope that God will continue to grant me the grace to see heart-rending beauty in the world (heart-rending indeed, because often beauty is preceded by unforgivable pain and even evil), if only because it is this beauty that gives me the strength to believe in God in the first place.