Enter sadness // Enter supper club
Enter sadness.
There are some days when I just feel the heaviness of the world. I feel in my body and soul that things are not how they should be. It seems like violence, need, hunger, and longing overwhelm all of the good. A few weeks ago, after what seemed like day after day of bad news, I sat down to try to process in words what I was feeling. It started off, "I'm not even sure what words I need to write today. I just feel a heaviness about the world. So much political noise with the midterm elections and awful words on Twitter, another mass shooting, huge wildfires in California, senseless tragic deaths, sick kids, the man downstairs shouting." As my stream of consciousness developed, I moved into the questioning phase. How do people become so violent and mean? So lost or abandoned or lonely or hateful that they kill others? (As an aside: This question led me to google which other species kill their own kind, admittedly a somewhat depressing but worthwhile bit of reading. It turns out some do, but since research on the moral capacity of most animal species is limited, it still puts humans in a unique place of cold-blooded violence). What makes a person threaten another person, with or without good reason? Is it a need for power? A need for acceptance, or the absence of? Is it instinctual or learned? Spending a good amount of time with a four and seven year old right now, I've gotten an interesting glimpse into childhood and it's pretty clear that while beautifully innocent and sweet, at the same time, even young kids have the capacity for jealousy, selfishness, and cruelty. They have to be taught kindness and gentleness. But they have a keen understanding of sadness from the beginning.
I haven't looked for any data to support this point, but it seems to me that sadness is a universal emotion. It is one that can be recognized instantly on a face regardless of race, age, or cultural background. It can be felt in a story, a photo, or a song. Recently, at a Birdtalker show, the band introduced their song Blue Healer by simply saying, "this is a song about sadness." The very first lines hit me right in the gut:
Enter sadness, with your rain boots in blue
Since I can remember I’ve been runnin’ from you
But this time you sat your ass down with no intent to move
You ain’t no Blue Healer
I was struck by just how deeply the audience around me seemed to connect with the song, going along as the band led us on a journey of feeling the weight of sadness, letting it in, and letting it affect us. The song is poetry and in an elegant way manages to simultaneously showcase the beauty and the ugliness of sadness, while it ultimately assures there is good that sadness can lead us into if we open ourselves up to it--a blue healer. By the time they had finished playing and singing, it felt just a bit lighter in the room to me, like everyone had realized that here we are, all together, all experiencing sadness in our own small and big and important and trivial and devastating and life-shattering and sometimes simply solved with a cup of tea ways.
Enter supper club.
I think a lot about public health and, along with being an emotional and communal experience, that night I sang along to Blue Healer and Heavy and Want with a room full of people struck me as a sign of a significant mental health crisis. Namely, that we all connected deeply with and cheered loudly for songs about sadness and loneliness, yet those are rarely conversation topics in my interactions with others, aside from maybe a few close friendships. (Understandably, emotions such as loneliness that we feel as negative also make us feel vulnerable and are not necessarily the easiest conversation starter, but thankfully, Brené Brown is doing some good work on helping us all with that.) I draw on her wisdom, and more Birdtalker songs, when I think that perhaps acknowledging our collective experiences of sadness and loneliness and allowing them to draw us together and connect us as whole, complex individuals actually has the power to transform us and the world we inhabit together. Can exercising love and friendship and mutual support be the glue that keeps our communities together? Can taking the time to develop trust and safe spaces, to truly know someone's story and to share yours, begin to allow for healing and restore peace? Can approaching strangers with love and grace instead of skepticism and fear change not only the course of one interaction, but the trajectory of a life? Can human connection, somewhere, somehow, lead to one less person turning to violence against fellow humans? I don't expect to eliminate hateful actions altogether and recognize that there are many, many more political, economic, and social steps to be taken to prevent the needless loss of life. However, I will never underestimate the power of human kindness. I believe we all have a responsibility to do what is in our power to bring a little more love and acceptance and understanding to our sphere of influence, and the ripples we create can have far-reaching effects.
For me, right now, this looks like supper club: a weekly gathering of friends, and friends of friends, and sometimes near strangers, to simply share a meal. It looks like creating a space where people can come together to enjoy each other's company, experience human connection, and delight in good food. It looks like showing up on a Wednesday evening with all of our collective sadness from the week, pouring a glass of wine, lighting a few candles, and maybe, just maybe, leaving a little lighter than we came.
There are some days when I just feel the heaviness of the world. I feel in my body and soul that things are not how they should be. It seems like violence, need, hunger, and longing overwhelm all of the good. A few weeks ago, after what seemed like day after day of bad news, I sat down to try to process in words what I was feeling. It started off, "I'm not even sure what words I need to write today. I just feel a heaviness about the world. So much political noise with the midterm elections and awful words on Twitter, another mass shooting, huge wildfires in California, senseless tragic deaths, sick kids, the man downstairs shouting." As my stream of consciousness developed, I moved into the questioning phase. How do people become so violent and mean? So lost or abandoned or lonely or hateful that they kill others? (As an aside: This question led me to google which other species kill their own kind, admittedly a somewhat depressing but worthwhile bit of reading. It turns out some do, but since research on the moral capacity of most animal species is limited, it still puts humans in a unique place of cold-blooded violence). What makes a person threaten another person, with or without good reason? Is it a need for power? A need for acceptance, or the absence of? Is it instinctual or learned? Spending a good amount of time with a four and seven year old right now, I've gotten an interesting glimpse into childhood and it's pretty clear that while beautifully innocent and sweet, at the same time, even young kids have the capacity for jealousy, selfishness, and cruelty. They have to be taught kindness and gentleness. But they have a keen understanding of sadness from the beginning.
I haven't looked for any data to support this point, but it seems to me that sadness is a universal emotion. It is one that can be recognized instantly on a face regardless of race, age, or cultural background. It can be felt in a story, a photo, or a song. Recently, at a Birdtalker show, the band introduced their song Blue Healer by simply saying, "this is a song about sadness." The very first lines hit me right in the gut:
Enter sadness, with your rain boots in blue
Since I can remember I’ve been runnin’ from you
But this time you sat your ass down with no intent to move
You ain’t no Blue Healer
I was struck by just how deeply the audience around me seemed to connect with the song, going along as the band led us on a journey of feeling the weight of sadness, letting it in, and letting it affect us. The song is poetry and in an elegant way manages to simultaneously showcase the beauty and the ugliness of sadness, while it ultimately assures there is good that sadness can lead us into if we open ourselves up to it--a blue healer. By the time they had finished playing and singing, it felt just a bit lighter in the room to me, like everyone had realized that here we are, all together, all experiencing sadness in our own small and big and important and trivial and devastating and life-shattering and sometimes simply solved with a cup of tea ways.
Enter supper club.
I think a lot about public health and, along with being an emotional and communal experience, that night I sang along to Blue Healer and Heavy and Want with a room full of people struck me as a sign of a significant mental health crisis. Namely, that we all connected deeply with and cheered loudly for songs about sadness and loneliness, yet those are rarely conversation topics in my interactions with others, aside from maybe a few close friendships. (Understandably, emotions such as loneliness that we feel as negative also make us feel vulnerable and are not necessarily the easiest conversation starter, but thankfully, Brené Brown is doing some good work on helping us all with that.) I draw on her wisdom, and more Birdtalker songs, when I think that perhaps acknowledging our collective experiences of sadness and loneliness and allowing them to draw us together and connect us as whole, complex individuals actually has the power to transform us and the world we inhabit together. Can exercising love and friendship and mutual support be the glue that keeps our communities together? Can taking the time to develop trust and safe spaces, to truly know someone's story and to share yours, begin to allow for healing and restore peace? Can approaching strangers with love and grace instead of skepticism and fear change not only the course of one interaction, but the trajectory of a life? Can human connection, somewhere, somehow, lead to one less person turning to violence against fellow humans? I don't expect to eliminate hateful actions altogether and recognize that there are many, many more political, economic, and social steps to be taken to prevent the needless loss of life. However, I will never underestimate the power of human kindness. I believe we all have a responsibility to do what is in our power to bring a little more love and acceptance and understanding to our sphere of influence, and the ripples we create can have far-reaching effects.
For me, right now, this looks like supper club: a weekly gathering of friends, and friends of friends, and sometimes near strangers, to simply share a meal. It looks like creating a space where people can come together to enjoy each other's company, experience human connection, and delight in good food. It looks like showing up on a Wednesday evening with all of our collective sadness from the week, pouring a glass of wine, lighting a few candles, and maybe, just maybe, leaving a little lighter than we came.
Comments
Post a Comment