Tearified

“I heard a story from a friend about a woman who was always laughing, always happy. She was this happy person, very attractive, attractive in the sense that people just surrounded her because of the joy she radiated. And one day, it was either him or someone else met with her and said, "So why, what's your secret? What's the secret of your joy?" And she said, "I'm joyful. I'm happy because I know how to cry. I know how to cry." And maybe that is the thing for me here: there's something reductionistic about the pursuit of happiness – i.e., let's build a tower of Babble and climb into the ethereal regions, the atmospheric regions, the highs. Let's get high, let's escape the lows, the doldrums, the depressive, let's escape the flood of tears.” (See this link )

That sounds crushingly simple. Crushing a learned need for complicatedness – a way of justifying my observative, interconnected, associative and embodied experience of life by rendering it more “expertise-like.” “I’m happy because I know how to cry” – yes, please. It sounds vividly playful, also. Not a rigid categorization of negative versus positive or good versus evil, but a very layered, dynamic, dialectical, and indeterminate process, our minds communicating their bodiliness, not bodylines. No need to pursue lightness to counterbalance the darkness. Difficulty with tears, to be direct. We project disharmonies upon the performative nature of tears. As if we are “tearified". Something might overwhelm us. Life will.

I have been sick, laying in bed with intense aching muscles. Feverishly, I notice how being drawn into bed is silencing some traces of a psychological sense of being existentially threatened. Being pulled into this body is like being pulled in the shapeshifting world. I give in to the limbo reflected by a changing body temperature. My skin hurts as it does easily. It is the otherwise soothing because suiting blanket that feels awkwardly uncomfortable, but I rest my case anyhow.

This pain will probably pass.

While I am slowly recovering from this almost traditional New Years flu it is the resistance that comes with an increasingly less steamed mind that creates suffering. Getting-better now sounds paradoxical.

How to be happy? This “how to” is an interesting question. It pulls me back into my also increasingly more yearning mind. The “how to” is precisely this. The pain is “intertaining” me, laying with it comes with some happiness, not only because I lost track of many pursuits of future joy, also because the pain undermines a sense of separateness. I need to ask for help, cancel appointments, and certainly not overcomplicate this particular experience. I am because I am process.

Some tears ran over my cheek as I allowed myself to experience the painful skin. It was no fun, but it was a ritual birthing gratefulness for this bodily process. I don’t want to bypass physical suffering, but I do see it as an opening towards life’s experience. At some point in the process, this mindful seeing will diminish and life experience – what we coined dying – will fully take-over. Or so I imagine it to be by now.

Every time we get out of bed, we implicitly strengthen certain power structures over others. Being healthy over being sick, being useful over being useless, being beautiful over….Through the cracks in habitual thinking that being-sick offers, I notice certain mental and behavioral tendencies with brightness. Listening to the so-called sick is insightful for our social beings to learn how to be and become with these ever-changing complex worlds amidst an existential falling apart.