Last three days have been an emotional roller coaster. Some realizations, things held unspoken, encountering some shadows, some grief that collied with celebration, or because of it. And I feel exhausted. My eyes are tired. On an impulse as I was coming home in a rickshaw and it started to rain, I put my head out and looked at the sky with eyes wide open. Mostly for the rain water to go into my eyes and felt I would get relief. It was way better than rose water. Very quickly the expressions on the faces of passerby cars made me remember to “get-in”. I smiled, imagining what they would be thinking.
I felt strangely calmer as if my tears were met by the rains. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction. And I felt a spontaneous moment of deep silence. All noise stopped.
A few days ago while doing a spell check on one of my pieces, I came across the word tear in the context of something been torn (present tense of torn – how ironical) And I thought it looked like tears. And although I wrote it, I still felt I must be making a mistake. While writing I meant split. But while reading I saw it as tears.
What a strange thing mind is. It reads what it is feeling. Not what is written, what is understood, what is logical – but what is felt.
I wondered, what else I may be reading which is filtered by my tears.
Talking about tears, I have had a difficult relationship with them. Till I was 27 I did not cry in front of anyone, and to top it I was proud of that fact. Till then I thought of tears as a sign of weakness and therefore people, as weak as well. And I had very strong judgements.
That did not mean I did not feel, but I had learnt to mask. I have come a long way since then.
I find tears fascinating..
When a child is born he/she needs to cry. Apart from the fact that that is the first sign of life and music to a mothers ears it is also a medical necessity. The doctors make sure the baby cries. This cry helps expand the baby’s lungs and expel amniotic fluid and mucus, all the unwanted stuff. Which ofcourse was useful at one time. The lungs kick into action to cry out loud, which also help draw in the first breath of his life. Explains why we take deep breaths after a good cry.
We cry for so many reason, at so many times. – We cry when we are sad, upset in grief – When we are angry and are not able to fully let it out – When we feel frustrated and helpless – When we feel deliriously happy and joyful – When we feel on the brink of ecstasy. – When we are I awe and in the presence of something utterly beautiful – When we are laughing uncontrollably. Tears have been labelled into a very small category of context.
“We don’t know anything about people who don’t cry,” – Michale Trimble
I have been very curious about tears and tear (please remember the earlier reference) – What has a tear got to do with tears. So I followed the salty trail.
I feel as if each of us has a threshold, an invisible boundary that we have learnt put around our emotional experience, and then keeping within those. Never really venturing out, never daring to even tentatively touch let alone take the risk and go to the other side. The “everyday” experience boundary – we believe keeps us “sane” – meaning we can “control it” – does not matter if we don’t feel “alive”. There is a sense of ennui that sets in sooner or later as we get used to the baseline of emotions and experiences.
Some other brave or crazy souls, often but not only, some artists, let the tear happen and do go there and beyond. There is, like everything, a price to be paid as well as the reward.
The price is often a kind of madness in which there is abandon and being led by the invisible. Judgements of people (like me), being ostracised albeit in polite terms, being alone – often and bidding adieu to “normal” .
The rewards are the flow the feeling of surrender and the joys of creation, thriving in uncertainty, touch with magic and the invisible world, and the incredible feeling of being alive. And a certain delicious humour when we realizes we were never alone to start with. Literally.
When we are babies the world around is perceived as an extension of self, there were no boundaries. And so there was no questions of breaking them. And so we cried, laughed, screamt without a though of the risk.
Tears are a way of making the Unknown – known. To ourselves and others.
Perhaps that is why we get so attracted to babies -They remind us of how all of us were till sophistication, and what will people say, scrubbed experiences and then slowly the desire for such experience of the rawness out of us. And we became, controlled, like the fan which has a regulator and someone sets the limits to what was ok and what was not ok. Hips may sometime lie but tears don’t. They can’t.
And yet, the wild is so kind that it does not forsake us. It keeps drawing us to art to nature to babies to pets to movies to meet the eyes of the random homeless person on the street, even as the voices of socialization keep hounding to not look not touch not feel.
Maybe we need to heed to that part of us that lives there on that edge. And beckons us.
Perhaps this not living fully – remain cadged in our own boundaries is madness. After all entropy of a closed system only accelerates. Tears then, are a barometer of if we have reached that boundary beyond which perhaps we will meet Rumi.
Perhaps tears need rebranding. Perhaps we need to let the tears fall, so that something can come up, like love, grief, courage, gratitude, joy connection freedom and mostly importantly Truth.
Perhaps it is time we let ourselves feel and encounter everything – to the Point of tears.
3 Comments