22. On sorrow
Dear Readers,
How are we? It’s August (already, etc) and there’s a small shift in the season. The dew lies longer on the grass and cold cars in the morning and our neighbour Pat put on a jacket when she took the dogs out earlier.
The sky is grey where I am, on a train rolling through Pevensey and Westham. I’m heading up to London, and I am very tired. I feel disconnected from the words as I write them – this is my fourth or fifth attempt at this sentence. I am tired from doing too much and resting too little. I’ve been well, but then on mornings like this with that drag of lost sleep and a cat pissing where they shouldn’t have pissed and where is my phone charger and if only I’d woken up earlier I’d have time for all this and now I’m cranky and grumpy and moany and sad because all of this could have been avoided and here I am again.
I left the house and walked up the hill. The brambles have their summer weight, still heavy with sweetening fruit and thickened leaves and even after all the heat the air is rich and smells of green.
I thought about sadness. It doesn’t always hang around, as a feeling. Like joy. It’s usually fairly fleeting. For me, at least. In Irish, you don’t even feel sadness. To say I am sad, you say tá brón orm, but it means sadness is on me, as if I have no agency or authority to hold onto it. A passing thing. A good way of looking at it.
I thought about sorrow, then. A word that has more strength. It feels raw, hard, serious, holding. A thing with hooks. A thing of time. A thing of patience. A more permanent guest.
When we live with sorrow we work harder for those fleeting joys. Sorrow gets in our way and waits to find us on our own. I say we. It’s something we feel together in families and friendships and communities feeling loss or sudden upset or fear of the unknown or what is outside our control. We’ve all felt it and we’re feeling it now. There’s a lot happening, and it’s happening to everyone.
But we are really good at getting through things together. We’re all people, and we understand how people feel and how things effect us. Sometimes we forget to say we need a hand or we’re feeling low or we’re just not ourselves. I do, anyway. When we remember to talk to each other, sorrow is easier to see for what it is. We can do it better together.
In Irish we have a word for loneliness, uaigneas, that has added meaning to it – something like seclusion, or withdrawal, and something like sorrow. It’s a heavier word than brón, and could describe this feeling of not really being part of our humankind. But of course, you say tá uaigneas orm, meaning loneliness is on me, making it a thing to be mindful of, a thing that’s with us now but not forever.
I’m not sure how to wrap up this letter. I am feeling more awake now, and I’m looking forward to a day in the big city. Mind yereselves and each other, a chairde.
Yours sincerely,
Paul