Feeling Blue You Too!
Now why do we call this feeling of sadness, being under, etc as blue! My online research threw up lots of different answers to the origin of this expression, yet there wasn’t a single universal consensus to its neonatal source. So, here’s my version, why feeling low is often referred as feeling blue:
I am a die-hard romantic (no matter what the women of my life who have passed me by say) and my favourite colour is blue. I associate blue with the abundance of the day lit sky, to the vast bodies of water aka lakes, rivers, oceans, glaciers, all appearing blue as they reflect the azure sky above. I would like to believe, which happens to me too, though rarely do I feel blue, when I feel a bit down under, I walk up into nature, mostly mountains or a mountain lake or waterfall, or a glacier and simply immerse myself mind, body and soul into the blueness all around. Into that shimmering, shifting, scintillating blue when I surrender, I feel that same lightness of being content, happy and airy, full of vigour, excitement and promise to live another day to my fullest.
So, for me feeling blue is the place where I go, which is bathed in various shades of blue, which cures my feeling blue. Thereafter I appreciate the blue without feeling blue. Therefore, I would suggest that you follow my way of dealing with the feeling of blue. Instead of feeling sad and depressed and being altogether blue, go to a place within nature (not inside a blue room or blue cubicle or a blue/green money seeking therapist for heaven’s sake) which is blue and you would discover that the feeling blue feeling leaves you in that blue place.
In a way your malady becomes your cure. You felt blue, you went to a blue place in nature, and do not feel blue anymore, though all shades of blue surround you. Right?
Now let’s return to another important point that I stated at the beginning. Why should this feeling blue feeling (sadness) be even necessary? Why cannot we be perpetually and forever happy? I do not think that it is humanly possible to remain completely oblivious and indifferent to the vagaries and challenges of living a human life that you simply do not have the emotion called sadness or grief or feeling blue. It is not possible to be human and to have absolutely no sadness. Those who claim that they are (and there are many self-appointed gurus who do just that) are either lying blatantly or not human.
The entire universe is founded upon some basic fundamental principals and laws, which cannot be escaped. One such primary law is that everything exists in pairs of opposites. So, we have night and day, yin and yang, positive and negative charged particles, cold and heat, so with our emotions, happiness and sadness. Without ever being sad how would you know that you are experiencing happiness. Without ever failing how would you realize when you succeed. Without an end how would we know how to begin. In Hinduism belief even God is depicted as half male half female. Only this way a balance can be maintained in the cosmos.
The point is not whether we should feel blue, because it is inevitable that if you are born a human (I hope you are not an alien reading my post) you would have your moments of grief and sadness with or without any apparent reasons. The point is how long would you dwell and stay within this feeling. My suggestion (which I apply to myself), do not stay there any longer than absolutely necessary. It’s like tasting a forbidden fruit just a little bit, exactly as much as you need to understand how it tastes and smells and then let it go. Do not go on to eat and devour it fully and then keep it within your belly forever. That would cause indigestion and further physical complications.
Feelings of sadness or grief by itself is neither good nor bad for our wellbeing. But it is in our holding on to them that makes them either good or bad. Just for a bit is good, because then you emerge stronger than before, but holding on to it any longer is really bad because then you just keep sinking deeper and deeper into the fathomless ocean of melancholy. If that happens then there is almost no hope left for recovery.
It's like my climbs. I know that I want to go far but how far depends upon me. Similarly ask yourself for how long will I hold on to my sadness, till it makes me start feeling happy, or till it kills me with its never-ending grief. For when to end the sadness depends completely upon you. Sadness is not holding onto you; you are holding on to sadness. The power is within you to let it go and feel uplifted and happy and find a purpose to life again.
Everything that begins, must and will end. But at times you have to end it before it ends you. Just don’t get too familiar and comfortable with your grief.
Trying to get too deep into the reason of sadness can at times be detrimental and take you even further deeper into a sinkhole. Let’s look at this way, when we drink water, take a breath, eat a food, wear clothes, or buy a watch, we don’t first start analysing what is the composition of water or air or the food, etc and then how was it created, formed, etc. We don’t consult a therapist or a scientist to find out all these useless data (at the time you are thirsty/hungry etc). We first drink to our fill and eat to our happiness. And when we are full and glowing, we might try to solve the mystery of what we just ate, drank, wore, etc.
Then why don’t we do the same thing with our sadness and grief. Why is it so important for us to understand the causation, the origin, composition of our sadness first before we let it go and get self-cured. We spend fortunes on running from one therapist to another, popping pills by kilos, read all sorts of self-depressing (so called self-help deep analysis experts) reports, books to understand what’s wrong with us. To each one of you I would like to say, hey, if you feel sad there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You are just being human and feeling a little blue.
Just acknowledge and accept that you are feeling low and once you see it, hold it, just drop it and let it go. Just like you drank the water when you were thirsty, rather than running for years to find out why water is what it is, since by then you would have died of thirst. If you must find the cause of your sadness, first cure yourself of it, because that is more important than finding the reason behind it and then go and find it like an objective scientist and not look at something that is too personal.
And if some of those so-called psychologists and therapists tell you that you are clinically depressed and sad and that you cannot be cured unless you complete one hundred sessions costing thousands of dollars, then just tell them to first cure themselves. I can bet that everyone out there who profess they can cure you is suffering themselves from the same malady. I am not a so-called professional therapist or a doctor, but I can speak from personal experience. So why not give my method a try. It doesn’t cost anything and almost no physical effort either.
Just drop your sadness, depression, grief, whatever it is. And believe me, time is the biggest therapist. But how long this therapist (time) will stay with you, depends upon your will and desire to get cured and how soon you can drop the burden. When I see people suffering and complaining and depressed all their lives and blaming the world for it, then I realize that in their heart of heart they actually do not want to get cured. Because if they became healthy, they will lose the sympathy and pity of the world. Then they will need to be and act responsibly. Like someone once told me, oh to become good and healthy is so bad, because then the society expects too much from me and that’s a lot of hard work.
Now I will end with an impromptu (I swear by the mountains) poem –
The feeling of blue
Is not only true
But necessary too
Though it is up to you
To hold it too
Or give it a shoo
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