…Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain…When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight…. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy…
- Excerpted from Kahlil Gibran’s On Joy and Sorrow
It has often been the case in my life that moments of exuberance and fulfillment have been accompanied by deep sadness and heartbreak. I do not think I am unique in this experience, though I may be particularly attuned to the ways in which my emotional body experiences and has had to practice holding both.
In the early spring of 2011, a dream that had lived in me for many years was actually coming to fruition. The outdoor education program that I had designed and had been running piecemeal versions of for a few years had finally reached the point where I could hire a full staff for a month-long run of programs. During the first week of programming, I received some news that cracked open a deep well of personal heartbreak. The next few weeks were filled with a profound experience of dissonance.
I would, in one moment, be fully present to the incredible dream unfolding around me: interacting with groups of middle and high school students as they made their way through our obstacle courses, supporting my staff as they built supportive relationships with the students, and coaching teacher chaperones. In those moments I felt so vibrant, so fulfilled, so clear headed and alive in my body.
And then, when stepping away from the group, the deepest forms of agony would wrap themselves around my body. I would be walking the path from the camping meadow and I would suddenly have to stop, unable to catch my breath, unable to tame the beast of grief erupting from my heart. Barely able to hold myself up, I would collapse and cry until I regained enough strength to make it back to my cabin.
At the time I had a lot of feelings about having to hold these two things together. It didn’t feel fair that this Joy that I was experiencing in the fruition of one of my dreams would have to be diminished by a wound from a different part of my heart.
A few years later, in the early fall of 2015 I was in a different moment of deep heartbreak and an existential undoing. This one was not paired with any dream fulfillment and had me stuck in a deep state of Sadness. One afternoon, on the advice of a friend, I walked into a near empty movie theater and went to sit near the back. Aside from me, the theater was sprinkled with a handful of young children and their adult caretakers. The movie, Inside Out, follows the inner emotional life of a young girl as she navigates a new and stressful moment in her life.
What I especially loved about the movie was the relationship that developed between the emotions Joy and Sadness. When, towards the end of the film, Joy realizes that Sadness is the only one that can help break the main character out of her place of emotional overload and willingly gives over the controls, I found myself crying uncontrollable tears. It was a truly beautiful moment, the recognition of the place and power of Sadness.
At the time I was deeply invested in the power of sadness. The friend who recommended I see the movie did so because of the sadness she recognized in me. I had let sadness take the controls and steer me into a place of deep and prolonged grieving. It was not pleasant but it was necessary.
Looking back at that version of myself, there was another big takeaway from the movie that - while I may not have articulated it at the time, did resonate with the way that I understood my emotional world. Soon after the climactic tears, Joy and Sadness learn how to share the controls, they learn how to live in the main character together, and they start producing memory balls that glow blue and gold - that contain Sadness and Joy together.
This week, I have been holding in my body that very familiar feeling of Joy and Sadness. I spent much of this week operating at my very best: sharing in powerful learning, deep conversation, laughter and play, song and dance with wonderful friends from many of my communities. And, in every one of those moments, there is an underlying sense that I might, at any moment, collapse into a puddle of tears that are living just a millimeter beneath the surface. It has been a full and beautiful week.