There is the question:
how to be happy but is it just as fair to ask how to be sad?
Maybe because it's raining in New York, or maybe because I'm cold and don't have a sweater at hand, but right now I'm thinking about melancholy. Whatever it is, whether it be the deep deep gray skies or else my desire to escape this freezing room and run outside into the rain, the rain that is at least warm like the summer, I don't know, but what I do know is that my musings are not because I am sad. For whatever reasons, my mind, right now, wants to explore the beauty of sadness.
Why do we like sad songs? Why do we like sad stories? Why do sad colors please the eye? It's simple to say that it is because they give the happy ones more meaning, more happiness. A day like today, wet and wetter, makes tomorrow's morning sun shine brighter. A duality like this adds meaning to every layer in between the poles. On a rainy day the facades of skyscrapers draw the attention of the eye in a way that is impossible when the sun shines bright and the blue skies flatter our irises. Beneath the gaze of the melancholic eye, often ignored buildings (and often ignored feelings) become beautiful in their own drab way.
To ignore the beauty of sadness is to ignore the beauty of half of the color wheel, to ignore half of the human experience. Maybe we appreciate rainy days and rainy weeks and maybe months because we know that they are replenishing in us what it means to be human, and that eventually all that stored water will prevent drought and sustain (with meaning) the lush green life of our happiness.
So maybe it is as simple as I said above, that a rainy today makes for a sunnier tomorrow. But how can we distinguish the beautiful melancholic from depression? When we forget what the sun looks like at all?
