Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
The first time I read this passage from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran I was seventeen. It was it was translated into French as part of a high school exam and I was prompted to write my thoughts on the passage. Here’s what I wrote (translated from French):
The text says “your joy is your sadness unmasked,” meaning the two are fundamentally the same sentiment. They come from the same place in the heart. We feel joy when we react positively to this base emotion, and sadness when we react negatively.
The more sadness we have suffered, the more joy we are capable of feeling. We must experience the bad to be able to appreciate the good. This works the other way as well: the more joy that we have felt, the more sadness we can suffer; especially if we suddenly lose the cause of our joy. In this case, the fact that we have known joy causes our sadness.
Things, people, or events that make us sad are often things, people or events that make us joyful. If we love someone and they hurt us, it causes much more sadness than if someone that we don’t care about hurts us. If we do something that brings us joy with someone, and then this person leaves or dies, the same activity makes us think of this person’s departure, and consequently makes us sad.
Sadness and joy come together; they are in equilibrium. But, that’s only true to a point, because we must be capable of raising their levels, we must have either joy or sorrow become stronger than the other for a period of time. These boosts are caused by significant events in life. When we open our hearts so we can feel more joy, we also open up to sadness. We cannot avoid it. If we want to feel joy at the most intense level, we must suffer the equal and opposite emotion.
The only way to not feel sadness it to feel nothing, and that it not worth it. If we were capable of eliminating sadness, there would be no joy and we would have equilibrium: nothing and nothing are easy to balance.
Ever feel like you knew more as a teen than people gave you credit for?