Someone should have told us we wouldn’t die if we did not have eternal happiness. Since the dawn of man, our only worry was food and safety in order to survive. These days, we think, if we aren’t happy all the time, we’ll die. What was it that changed? Are we, as so many people say, “too soft”?
Once we were ruthless fighter, we were paranoid and sat around the fire telling scary monster stories that was a way of understanding our world, and kept us alert. Today we are telling stories in order to get more of something out of the world, and we are easily insulted and very paranoid. We slaughtered animals in order to live, either to eat or because they were threatening us. Today we slaughter animals for the choicest cuts and leave the rest for those who cannot afford the bet cuts. And we call the best cuts by foreign names so that we can say them and sound somehow better than those who never heard the words. We ante up on our travels by trying to name all the continents we have visited while our parents or grandparents came North as pioneers in buckwagons and covered wagons, driving horses through seriously dangerous territories. Today we get paid a hundred thousand dollars if we can ‘outlive’ ten other people dropped off, Alone, in some deserted area with nothing but three survival tools. We take food, shelter and warmth for granted. And, we aren’t happy all the time and we pay big bucks to those who think they can help us be happy and it doesn’t work.
We were never meant to be happy all the time. Every single person on earth has bouts of sadness and negative thoughts. It is ‘normal’. It I NOT ‘normal’ if you do not. It is ‘normal’ to think sadness may never end. It is not ‘normal’ if it does not. It is ‘normal’ to wish there was a switch somewhere that could turn the negative self-talk off. It is in our very DNA to feel like/think something might go wrong. It is NOT ‘normal’ to refuse to allow for sadness/negative self-talk at all. Our ancestors’ very survival meant they had to be on high alert, to be paranoid, to be on heightened defence all the time. We do not. No one can make us feel sad, to feel negative, to feel doomed. Those feelings come from within us.
Life was once truly brutal. Our brains were highly tuned to danger. It was feast or famine. The greatest theme was competition. Competition with the animals for food... Competition with others for land and rights to the animals that were food. Everything was centered on survival. Today, we get insulted if someone doesn’t let us in to merge. What did happiness mean to our ancients?
“If one of our ancestors ever actually became happy with his
possessions, with his social standing, or with what he had
accomplished in life, he would suddenly be in a particular
kind of danger. There was no cradle of civilization to depend
on if something went wrong. So, survival required us to make
our own safety nets. Having enough could never feel like
enough, or else we’d become complacent, leaving us
vulnerable to predators, competitors, and bad luck. Lasting
happiness was too risky.”-David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again.
We live in a world where competition is of different kinds. All of our inventions to make life easier has not made us happy. The more we have, the more we want. W feel like we fail if we do not have more than others. Women will stiletto-heel it to the top of the heap in competition with men. Women are competing with their sisters. We are too busy to be kind. We are too busy to notice when others are unhappy and we do not have respect for those who are sad. We fear sadness. It equates to having failed in some way. We try to hide our sadness. We try to deny our sadness even to ourselves until sadness cannot be denied. Then we crash. It is like the sadness has been saved up and now we fall into an ocean of hurt. We fear sadness, indeed.
We fear sadness because we do not believe we are strong enough not to sink further than a fleeting sadness. We are culturally encouraged to feel that sadness is contradictory to a good life. There is this idea that has been part of our conditioning that says that to allow ourselves to feel sad is to be overwhelmed by the feeling(s) and we will die having that sadness never go away. We do everything we can not to feel any sadness. But, reality is, if w take the time to feel the feelings, they will dissipate. The more we try NOT to feel the sadness, the more power it gains. I remember saying that IU could not cry because if I ever started, I might not be ale to quit. The same is with sadness to many of us. But, if we give ourselves permission to feel, truly, deeply, feel the sadness, it dissipates more quickly. I feel that we should honor sadness, to give it the status of importance that sadness should take. It means we are real, if we feel sad. We are not denying any part of our gift of feelings given to us at creation. Sadness is part of our truth. We do not hide our happiness. We should never have to hide our unhappiness.
Feel what is truth to you, sisterfriends. I honor the sadness in you because I am now honoring the sadness in me.
©Carol Desjarlais 1.4.23
No comments:
Post a Comment