We all want to be happy, right? We want to be smiling and cheerful. We want a life of perpetual laughter and mirth. Sometimes we’re afraid of anything else. And sometimes we close ourselves up, so the only thing we can feel is happiness. We can carefully wrap our hearts up to guard them from anything but joy. We create sanitized worlds of positivity and optimism. We avert our eyes from anything that threatens our fragile sense of happiness.
But it is beautiful what happens when we expose our hearts to the real world. When we accept the sorrow within ourselves, and choose to let the pain of the world overwhelm our souls. When we embrace that gritty and messy experience called reality. Rather than ignoring our own troubles, we can use that to reach out to an aching and hurting world. Our own sadness can create a dark spiral into ourselves, but instead we can focus it outward, and through our own suffering share in the experiences of others. This world needs people who care, people whose hearts are filled with compassion and empathy. And that can come only if we know what it means to cry, to hurt, and to ache. Sometimes I think our own suffering is the only thing that will break through the white-washed lives of superficial happiness that we have built. Sometimes it takes our own deep aching to realize how much the rest of the world is hurting too. Then it is poignant and precious thing when our sorrow becomes the way we help the broken and hurting world around us.
