What do you think about when you're feeling down?

Even when I was very young, lest those feelings consume me completely and almost instantly, my response to sadness was to encourage and use the feelings to create something new in my world. Rather than the intensity of emotions driving me further into sadness merely in the knowledge of that intensity, I seemingly delighted in the darkness for its better power to inspire what I value most - intense passion for life, intense experience, the depth and power of my own heart, and a seeming gift for voicing it out into nature and history in ways somewhat accurate to the feelings, somewhat unique and sometimes interesting to others. If it weren't for a strong lifelong instinct to spend my moments and energies creating, extreme passions from light to dark would have driven me to my end long before now ... and almost nearly did on a number of occasions when I had briefly forgotten that safer way to look at sadness.

I now understand intellectually what before I'd only innately felt - If we genuinely believe life to be better than the absence of life, we must always welcome, even celebrate, whatever emotions come to us. We must be driven passionately to create anew no matter their nature. Just as we seek happiness and delight, and for the very same reasons, we must seek sadness and despair. As whole human beings, we have the gift of it all. To know ourselves as fully as is possible in our own lifetimes, we must deliberately explore and develop all that's true of us as individuals. In doing so, and because darkness and light are possible to us all, our personal explorations, discoveries, knowledge, wisdom and expression of ourselves has the very real potential to connect in authenticity with others like us and benefit them in ways almost entirely unpredictable by any.

In a word, I remain a partner to, even a worshiper of sadness by loving it as best as I'm able and denying myself fear of it. That fear is rooted in a false belief - a belief in eternity, in permanency, in "perfection", in an unchanging nature. I accept change, impermanence, imperfection, and the inevitability of the undesireable. I accept them as necessary to life as any thing other. I accept all of life because the alternative is no life at all. Anyone who claims to authentically love their life, must love it all - even its pains and sadnesses, miseries and madnesses - or cease pretending to authenticity, full love, and full life.

Sadness is life and, if one loves life, must be fed, cherished, and given voice in its time.