There are no good deeds?!

Is it wrong to cry when they die?

At my father’s funeral, the one thing that I could not appreciate listening to was people telling me not to cry and asking me to be strong. How are tears connected with weakness in this context anyway? Someone dies, you love them, you are attached, it’s natural to feel a little sad right when it happens! Should I be strong or should I be human?

People come with the best of intentions and lots of love. But they land up saying things that take you further away from being healed. They give you more expectations that you should try to live up to, even in that situation. 

Death isn’t misery. Death is a relief. I completely second that. Having said that, I also feel it takes a few hours or days to get used to it. In that much time, it’s not right on our part to expect people to be this way or that way. 

Do you realize that most people say sorry when they cry? We have literally made crying an offense. People might not apologize even if they abuse you at times. But they definitely apologize when they cry in front of you. That’s how inappropriate we have made crying in our society. Why though?

I am not advocating drama by any means. It’s not healthy to make a drama of death. It’s a natural process that everyone goes through. And different people have different ways of going through with it. Some cry, some don’t. Those gentle tears are ways of letting go of all the pent up emotions. And one shouldn’t be made to feel sorry for those tears. They are valuable. 

No one is meant to last forever. But the question to ask ourselves is, are we crying because we miss someone? Or are we crying because we feel sorry for ourselves? If you miss someone, you’ll start cherishing their memories as gifts and gain your own strength to keep going. If you feel sorry for yourself, that’s gonna be a killer! There’s no relief from that apart from you realizing that it is not all about you. You just have to get over yourself and look at life from a larger perspective. Their death wasn’t planned by the universe on a special agenda to make you suffer. Their time had come, so they had to go. Your suffering is your own creation in the meantime. When you make it less about you, you start to find more strength to get going.

Usually, when someone dies, we tend to think of their life in relation to ours. Naturally! We think of all that they were for us, all that they did for us, and now we start thinking who’s going to do that for me, who’s going to be that for me. And that’s how we start feeling sorry for ourselves. We start feeling lonely. But then when you starting thinking of their life, their message, their legacy, you find the motivation in you to carry them forward and be all that not just for yourself but for those around you too. That’s when you stop making their death all about you. And graciously move ahead. 

Hysterically crying all the time and blaming everyone around, or feeling sorry for oneself, isn’t what’s going to get anyone anywhere. But tears gently flowing down your cheek when you are filled with gratitude or when you are missing someone is far from a crime. 

Some of the things that we do that makes crying an uncomfortable experience are:

• Running with water, tissues, and other things to the person who is crying – what’s wrong with that? Be gentle about it. Don’t run like they are dying. They are just crying. If you have something around, gently hand it over to them. But if you make dramatic reactions yourself, it makes the other person feel even more conscious about themselves. 

• We immediately go pat on their back and tell them, “Please don’t cry”. Or we say, “don’t worry, everything will be fine.” What’s wrong with that? Well, how do you know everything will be fine?  Secondly, they know that too. But they are crying for this moment. Imagine you hurt your leg, you know you’ll be healed soon. But that doesn’t mean you won’t feel the pain now as soon as you got hurt right? I can’t ask you not to feel the pain today since it will heal tomorrow. I just have to be with you, for now, that’s all. 

• We tell them, ‘You are very strong. You should not cry. If you cry what will happen to others’. What’s wrong with that? Back to the opening para, tears and strength aren’t diametrically opposite to each other. Even if you are strong, you aren’t made of stone to not feel anything. It’s not the time for us to advise them about taking care of others. If we take care of them now, they’ll get the strength to take care of others. We don’t need to state the obvious. They know it already. The last thing we should do is making them feel guilty for having those emotions. We shouldn’t make them feel stifled or suffocated. 

This is why you shouldn’t try to avoid a thought or an emotion.

Have you ever noticed what happens when you try to avoid a thought or an emotion is, we get more into it? If I want to avoid thinking of someone – you’ll observe that you end up thinking more about them. If you want to avoid feeling a certain emotion like anger, sadness, or disappointment, you end up feeling more of it. Your best attempts to resist, help you do only that much – Resist temporarily and eventually succumb to it big time. Hence, it’s time to find better ways than trying to resist or forcefully stop something. 

The more you avoid it, the more it will seem like a monster lurking around the corner, which is ready to attack you anytime you drop your guard. Instead, observe it. When I say observe, it doesn’t mean hug it, identify yourself with it, and dwell in it. Imagine this, look up at the sky – you see those white clouds floating? What do you do when they are floating? You try to make out some familiar shapes at times, but otherwise, you just see them pass, don’t you? You don’t try to own them, avoid them, or chain them. Thoughts are something like that. Can you just observe and let them pass. Don’t give any importance to them. In trying to avoid them, you are giving a lot of importance to them. The minute you give importance, the size of the cloud, or the thought will increase. If you avoid a gentle drizzle, you might get caught up in a storm. To win the war, you have to let go of the battle. Observe the thought, don’t own it. It’s a floating cloud. Don’t act on it. Don’t judge it. Don’t evaluate it. Just dispassionately let it pass. If it helps, look at it from a distance, where you are a bystander and the thoughts are random clouds. Imagine they are black and white. (Add some funny song or tune to it mentally – if you think it helps). But don’t spend too much time paying attention. Let it pass.

Likewise, any emotion too. Like loneliness, or fear, or anything else. Avoiding it will be like an active volcano – any slight trigger and you’ll be waiting to erupt. Face it so that you will emerge on the other side and will be able to see clearly what it was all about. The ones that you are ready to face, cannot threaten you. The ones you try to avoid are the ones that scare you. To face it, you need to believe in yourself that you can see this through. You have gone through a lot in your life and emerged out of it until now. Trust that you can do this too. 

The thoughts and emotions that eventually kill us are the ones that we have desperately tried to avoid. Face them, stand tall – know that you are much bigger than any thought or emotion. Each cloud is a small fraction of the sky. The cloud can never engulf the sky. The sky is much more massive. The cloud can cover up the sky for a short bit but it has to pass. It doesn’t have the stability or the power in itself to stay stuck to any part of the sky ever. Just like your thoughts and yourself. Don’t fear a thought. Don’t fear an emotion. They cannot damage you without your consent. Don’t give your consent. Remind yourself you have an infinite number of thoughts apart from that one silly, odd thought that seems to question you or threaten your existence. If you stop holding on to this one, the next thought will immediately come in – and in that, you might find something nice for yourself.

An interesting data point while we are on this topic – we have around 12000-60000 thoughts per day. And we aren’t fully aware of all of these thoughts. So what makes you think that one particular thought about that person or about that feeling is going to kill you or make your life impossible? It’s your excessive attention to it. The importance you are attaching to that one thought is making you feel like you can’t exist with it. While all the other thousands of thoughts aren’t threatening your existence because you aren’t giving them that importance. In fact, you may not be paying any attention to them even! Let alone giving them importance!

You have to face it to emerge out of it. Yesterday’s blog on impact bias also says how we overestimate the emotional effect of any incident. So, it is not going to be as bad as you are imagining. You own yourself. The thoughts don’t own you. They are mere, powerless clouds. You give them power by giving them importance. That’s when they come down on us like a storm. If you stop feeding those clouds, you’ll have clear skies. A gentle rain once in a while, will not hurt you anyway. 🙂 Wishing you pleasant times!

Painful Purpose – not all that pains needs to be cursed!

A universal language that everyone is familiar with in their life at some point in time or the other is ‘pain’. The degrees may vary, the situations might differ, but pain is an experience, an emotion, a feeling that we all go through for sure. Each of us have unique ways of processing it and that determines our experience to a great degree.

An interesting point to note – the nature of pain is such that we cannot remember it clearly once it is gone. We tend to distort it in some way or the other. We can only recall perhaps how it felt but not know it fully after. And that’s quite helpful as it helps us move along. Else, we’d all be prisoners of a pain that was once upon a time.

Some try to repress it, some try to express it, some try to remember it, some try to be indifferent towards it. Whatever be the choice, they have consequences.

Remembering a part of how we felt when in pain, helps, as it enables us to empathise with others when they go through something similar. It also helps us sometimes, to stay away from that which caused us the pain and helps us keep safe as well. Hence, a short memory of pain is useful.

An obsessive memory of pain can be debilitating. We may be too gripped by the fear of pain or get into self-pity and feel like we have been wronged. Then life becomes a big screen drama with you as the victim and someone or the other to be persecuted for your sorrow. That’s when we truly become powerless in our own stories.

On the other side, if we take too much pride in our capacity to have dealt with it, we may border on arrogance. We will then find others’ problems too small compared to ours. We may tend to throw unsolicited advice and all that may be disrespectful. It can also appear that we think too much of ourselves or too little of the other. Therefore, it is important to remain grounded and humble as we think of our experience with pain.

An absolute lack of memory or repressing it can keep us going back to similar pains in the future or, make us indifferent towards others going through that kind of pain. It starts to show up in unexpected places in unexpected ways and creates unusual problems for us. And when we are being indifferent, we are just increasing the pain in the world. Hence, observing just how much we remember of it is helpful to either let go or remind ourselves of what’s necessary to remember. After all, pain is also for a purpose. If it is not serving any purpose, or if it is having counter-productive effects, we have chosen not to look at it or remember it, the way we should have.

Expressing pain in a healthy way is often helpful as the lack of it might lead people to treat you as a machine who knows no pain and can push it further. In the current day, no one is asked to be Hercules, unless we have offered ourselves in some way or the other through our actions and words in the past.  Misery is strictly optional. Why make it mandatory and invite suffering then? If people know you are in pain, at least someone in the environment (might not always been the one you wish for) might choose to be more supportive – and that often makes a world of difference when we are down and out. In a world of mind-readers, it is perhaps okay to not be expressive. But in a world which is consumed by technology and gadgets to the extent that they can’t see the pothole that they themselves are walking into – expecting that they’d understand and offer you help is a recipe for further pain. Therefore, it just helps to express one’s pain – without overly dramatizing it or persecuting others for it (else it may not serve its purpose and might even backfire).

Reflect to see what’s your representation of pain. Is it helping you and not adversely affecting anyone around you too? If not, check what strategy would you like to switch to. The idea is not to get consumed by the aspect of pain but rather be reflective about the purpose of it. It helps immensely not just in coping but also in making it work for us and not against us. You won’t be defeated by pain if you choose to stay determined around it.