Sadness of the Heart

The worst kind of sadness, I dare to say, is sadness of the Heart. We have this moral obligation to be happy, but as Albert Camus so well described "(...) there is no love of life without despair of life".

Life is a continuous challenge, lesson upon lesson... how easy it would be if it were easier... but we're not simple beings, and as Rottenberg smartly puts it, we have “the unaddressed business of filling our souls”.

That is why our Heart, for the sake of everyone, not just ourselves, needs to feel happy.

When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love and Love is our ultimate goal, the answer, da thing.

Because Love is learned, "What??!!", yes, Love is a learned dynamic interaction, when people around us, especially the ones that are there during our growth, Love each other, they're doing a great job teaching/educating us.

"If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? … The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all."
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Thich Nhat Hanh

Love allows us to accept others as they are and then they have a chance to transform. But to Love, we must first understand ourselves, we must first look for ourselves. Nhat Hanh again puts it with simplicity and honesty what it is that search:

"Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don’t know the cause; it’s very vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong. We expect and hope for something much better so we’ll feel less alone, less empty. The desire to understand ourselves and to understand life is a deep thirst. There’s also the deep thirst to be loved and to love. We are ready to love and be loved. It’s very natural. But because we feel empty, we try to find an object of our love. Sometimes we haven’t had the time to understand ourselves, yet we’ve already found the object of our love. When we realize that all our hopes and expectations of course can’t be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty. You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day! (...) You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person"

We don't exist just by ourselves. nothing in the natural world does, so the worst kind of sadness is indeed the one of the Heart, because it means solitude, frustration, lostness from everything. We need to feel connected, we need to feel we belong, that we're understood. Life is in a way a form of affirmation, we come to this world screaming as loud as we can! so we need to be seen and recognized. Now, I ask, how will we feel if we're unemployed, unloved, with no home, with no place in the world? Find your way, if you have found your way, help another. That is Love.