Sadness to feel happiness

"I wanted feeling to be the guide of life, not life to guide feeling.”

One of my favorite ways to think about happiness is to juxtapose it with sadness; you can’t understand one without experiencing the other.

The conversation is vivid in my mind. My coworker at the time, behind my post at the bookstore, told me he finds beauty in depression. To be human, to witness how such deep emotion can over take the mind, the body. Leaving you paralyzed.

I reframed my outlook on my lows. Intimate human connection, that feeling of building anticipation, is as raw and as beautiful as crippling pain. Without glorifying mental illness, it’s something many people can’t escape, and it’s something that with time, passes. In the good moments, I’ve built a foundation.

Family Happiness by Tolstoy talks about love and depression. She loses herself in him, dives into deep loneliness and longing, loves deeply and even recognizes her wins.

“I was tormented by the thought that this happiness cost me no effort and no sacrifice.”

“I wanted, not what I had got, but a life of struggle; I wanted feeling to be the guide of life, not life to guide feeling.”

With so many more things to say about this story, these few pages want me chasing the same; I tend to follow emotion over logic, and want to experience feeling, and allow feeling, despite its connotation, to guide life.