Sadness is our spirit's response to our own or another's loss.
It's unavoidable. We cannot go from our mother's womb to our own tomb without experiencing loss and sadness. It's a natural, normal, and appropriate response to loss.
The loss could be a death, an illness or injury, something we valued, the end of a relationship with someone we cared about, or any other kind of loss.
We often feel sadness in our chest. We might feel it as a heaviness, dull ache, or pain. We might speak of our heart feeling empty, wounded, or broken. Perhaps we've known of someone who "died of a broken heart."
Heart is synonymous with spirit. To die of a broken heart is to die due to the loss of what makes us alive, our spirit.
Since sadness has more to do with our thumos, our spirit, than our psyche and mind, it's more a thumological than psychological event.
Sadness can be acute, sudden, and relatively short-lived. It can also be chronic to the point of being the thumic norm of one's spirit.
As with other emotions, sadness can be either life-denying or life-affirming. Perhaps it's both.
Sadness is a weakening or ending of our spirit. As such it threatens or ends and therefore denies our life. However, it's also life-affirming because it expresses the value of life and affirms it. If we did not value life and its pleasures we would not feel sadness in response to its losses.
So, when we experience loss, let's feel sad. Let's fully accept our sadness. But let us also find ways to cope and comfort ourselves lest our sadness significantly weaken our life or even end it.
When we die of sadness, we put others at risk of the same.
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