Don’t Worry, Be Unhappy
It’s an unfortunate misconception of our age that all of us should be striving to achieve a state of uninterrupted happiness. If we aren’t happy, something must be wrong. Maybe our job is at fault. Maybe it's our partner. Maybe it’s our own inadequacy. We’re told that any lapse in our happiness is a problem that demands a solution, and when no solution presents itself, that makes us unhappier still.
Unrelenting happiness isn’t just impossible, it’s undesirable. The texture and contour of life depends on variation. A life with just one emotional flavor would be a meal seasoned only with saccharin. An existence with just one emotional color would be a monochromatic world rendered only in shades of pink.
We are meant to have a range of emotions. Each one is an internal reflection of our experience, and it gives us information about ourselves that can’t be found anywhere else. But diving into those murky waters is scary--and when they’re roiled up by a storm, the risk of drowning is real.
Denying difficult emotions seems like the safest course, but it often backfires. Emotions, like water, always seem to leak out and cause their damage in the end. Damming up emotions just delays the inevitable, and the energy it takes to build and maintain that dam exacts a toll as well.
So what should we do with all these inconvenient, unhappy emotions? One approach is to treat them like inclement weather. Don’t ignore them--manage them.
How strong are they? Are they proportional and appropriate to the situation? Where are they coming from? Are they misdirected, or attached to some underlying assumption that may or may not be true? What can you learn from them? Is there some way to prepare for them before the next storm?
Maybe you’d prefer a life full of endless sunny days. Some would call that a drought, but in any case, that’s not in the forecast. Seasons will change, and so will the weather, and so will your emotions. That’s as it should be. If it’s Hurricane Katrina, or irreversible climate change, that’s something else entirely. But usually, it’s just a passing storm: inconvenient, inevitable, a little scary, and beautiful in its own mysterious way.
