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In the eponymous fairytale, Sleeping Beauty's parents throw a joyous party to celebrate her long-awaited birth. They only have twelve place settings, so they invite twelve of the kingdom's thirteen wise women. The thirteenth wise woman, who is ill-tempered and lives in a remote corner of the kingdom, is not invited to the party.
The twelve sisters bestow blessings on the baby, but the thirteenth - enraged at being excluded - curses the child to an early death, a sentence which one of the other twelve sisters commutes to a one-hundred year sleep.
As the parents did with twelve of the wise women, we eagerly invite the positive emotions - happiness, excitement, pleasure - into our lives. We do what we can to encourage them to stay. Regardless of how well we treat them, our positive feelings are only guests; they come and go.
The way that the parents treated the thirteenth sister is the way many of us treat sadness and other negative emotions. We are not so eager to invite negative emotions - sadness, anger, fear -- into our lives. But like the thirteenth sister; they come anyway. And they do not take kindly to being excluded - avoided, ignored, or suppressed. Are we prepared to acknowledge these emotions and even to honor their wisdom - to give them a place at the table?
I am not suggesting that we turn over all of the seats at the table to negative emotions, to the exclusion of the positive ones. But to lay a place for negative emotions is a powerful gesture of inclusion, a way of embracing more completely the facets of human experience. Perhaps if the thirteenth sister had been invited, she would have offered Sleeping Beauty a healthy sense of skepticism alongside the sweetness bestowed by the other sisters, a sharp tongue to match her daintiness, or a groundedness beneath her angelic spirit.
