P52 Week 35 - Sadness

Some movies make me cry, no matter how often I watch them: Pretty Woman, when the girl gets the boy and Richard Gere climbs up the scary fire escape with a dozen roses to reach Julia Roberts; the end of the Lord of the Rings, when an exhausted Frodo wakes up in a sea of white in Rivendell and sees his trusty friends, all of whom have survived the epic destruction of the ring.

I am sad at the loss of summer, my favorite season. I pine for the warmth and mourn the waning of the light, the gathering darkness. I wonder: how many more summers will I be privileged enough to enjoy?

I’m sad at lost opportunity. I don’t have a mate.

I am sad when my granddaughter loses it and has a meltdown. I so feel her pain – it courses through me like a bolt of lightening. Ugh. I also felt that same anguish with my kids when they struggled with emotions as youngsters.

Sadness is such a complicated emotion and I almost always find it coupled with other feelings. As a kid, I cried when away from my parents. The emotion was of sadness – but also of fear, terror of being left alone. When I cry at movies, it’s because the sadness is combined with a longing for beauty, love, bravery and compassion. When I witness, or read about man’s inhumanity to man and the earth, the emotions I feel are a myriad of sadness, anger, grief, exasperation and outrage.

All that being said, a significant source of sorrow right now is that my good friend is moving far away. I have yet to open the floodgates of that complex range of emotions.