Darkness Before The Dawn: our need for sadness

The darkness is the sadness brought up by feelings of loss, and the uncertainty that anything good can be had in the future. This is your subconscious mind bringing your fears and doubts to the surface.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with feeling sad since sadness gives you a contrast for the times you feel happy, like the darkness gives contrast to the light. More importantly, sadness can give you the opportunity to grieve and heal your soul.

Your feeling of sadness occurs as a result of you either living in the past or living in the future. You may still be recalling all your past memories and dreams now lost to your future.

The problem is that being stuck in the negative cycle of memories and shattered dreams can eat away at the time you have left to live your life, while you are busy being unhappy, you are losing that time for being or doing anything else. How you are being and what you do in this moment determines your path for the future. The future will arrive anyway but how the future unfolds is totally up to what you think and do in this moment. The question is, how long are you going to give it before you allow yourself to feel better?

Darkness is simply an absence of light. Just because you can’t see anything it doesn’t mean there is nothing there. You can look through night vision goggles to see the truth of this. Light is a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation that is detectable by our eyes. The night vision goggles detect normally invisible infra red radiation and translate it to a visible wavelength. The darkness is an illusion and we are fooled by our perception (or lack of perception) that nothing else exists within it. Likewise, just because you experience sadness, it doesn’t mean happiness doesn’t exist. Accept sadness for what it is, it has it’s own purpose. Fighting against things causes their persistence, accepting things without resisting often means they dissolve away entirely due to lack of attention..

While your emotional darkness is generated by living in the past or future, the emotional light that drives it away exists only now, in this present moment. If you can bring your focus fully to this moment then your heavy feelings melt away like a candle drives away the dark. You’ve probably already witnessed this effect by being totally engaged in a task just before the thoughts of your loss snapped back into your consciousness. One minute you were fine and the next you got that knot in your stomach again. Nothing really happened outside of yourself, it’s all in your own head.

The state in which you find yourself now holds a perfect opportunity for you to create the rest of your life how you would like it to be. Accept that your sadness is a product of your own automatic thinking – and that there is nothing wrong with sadness in itself.

It doesn’t matter whether or not, right now, you see any future available to you, once you break out of the loop of replaying your ‘happy’ memories and lose the accompanying sense of emptiness then you will create a new space in your life in order to attract new opportunities. Allow the darkness to play its part in the process of the beauty of a new dawn, but don’t dwell under the illusion that there is no sunrise at the end of even the longest and darkest night.