What Loneliness Teaches Us About Sadness

There are emotions we instinctively try to ignore. One of them is sadness. As pointed out by Lisa Firestone, adults teach children—from an early age—to immediately stop crying when they are sad. They tell children that nothing is happening to them and that they are fine, as if children should forget their undesirable emotional state as quickly as possible.

But is it really helpful to picture sadness only as a negative emotion to be avoided?

In his Letters to a Young Poet, the Bohemian-Austrian writer and poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes what happens to us when we are inhabited by a feeling of sadness:

“You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad?”

Psychologists define sadness as a physiological emotion of grief and unhappiness that usually emerges in response to hurtful experiences or loss and only lasts for a limited period of time. It comes, it stays for a while, and then it goes away. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, sadness may underlie adaptive mechanisms to counteract the aforementioned negative events we experience in life.

For instance, humans can use it as a signal to attract the attention and assistance of others, eliciting empathy and strengthening social bonds. However, there are days in which we feel like these explanations are not satisfactory. For instance, there are days in which we wake up and feel sad, but we can’t figure out why. In Rilke’s view, sadness is indeed more than just a repairing process:

“I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing.”

Sadness confuses us. When we are sad, we cannot reason properly, we cannot feel other feelings properly. Our emotional capacity to sense and process the world is clouded. We perceive the world, and our own body, as distant entities. Rilke tells us that when something alien gets into us, sadness works like fever: it is a sign that, most likely, an infection is underway. What entered us is indeed both new and unfamiliar and now it is occupying the space of our intimacy. The problem is that we usually treat this infection as it was a self-acting, healing process, an inevitable burden we must passively suffer. We don’t go out anymore, and we wait for the others, our friends or family, to come and rescue us. Sadness will pass eventually. However, all of this doesn’t sound like the active “moment of transition” depicted by Rilke.

So, what else can be done?

To some extent, sadness is the counterpart of wonder. When something surprises us, we cannot reason properly, we cannot feel other feelings properly. But we long to uncover the cause of the surprise. All our energies are now actively focused on achieving this goal.

Let us now try to picture sadness the same way. Rilke invites us to embrace sadness as it was an active experience. Something hit us, and we now need to collect the strength to unmask it. When we are sad, we don’t happen to be alone because we feel weak and defenseless, but we instead choose to stay alone. We don’t wait for the others to rescue us, but we seek for our moment of loneliness. The question is: what should we do with it?

“And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside.”

Rilke tells us that sadness is more than just a process to fix our past. Our life can either change because of unpredictable and turbulent events shaking us from the outside, or because of silent, unseen events transforming us from the inside. Sadness can be the symptom that we are finally internalizing a change we don’t yet comprehend. The time for loneliness should be invested in proactively exploring this change.