“Everyone has a
right to be happy”! So says my lovely Igbo friend-Ruth. She’s a carefully sweet
lady whom I admire and trust a lot mainly because of her demeanor. Always calm,
always tender and soft spoken, her wide ‘tele-tubbies’ kind of smile seems to convey
the very meaning of happiness. I believed her completely when she said what
makes her happy is making others happy (and why not? After two sumptuous meals
over two visits to her place, I’m compelled to believe that she really does
understand the rudiments of how to make a man happy-a hungry man at least!).
Being around her is always about gist and fun and I think the world really
needs more people like her. Maybe all that a man needs is happiness. Or is it?
I’m not a
sadist. I’ve never been one and never will be one, but there indeed is
something peculiar about sorrow that makes it too important to be neglected or
marginalized in place of happiness.
Of course,
sorrow is always the enemy. Never encouraged, never entertained, the victims of
which are usually classified as lazy, unwise, thoughtless, careless, unlucky or
out rightly unfortunate. Isn’t it striking that as much as we are against it,
we all tend to get a dose of it at some point in our lives. The great truth is
that as inevitable as the night is to every day, as intricately as the touch of
anarchy creates a refined beauty out of orderliness, and as explicit as the
presence of trouble conveys the purest definition of peace, so also is the
brightness of happiness never truly appreciated, until a moment of experience
in the stygian gloom of sorrow. The best happiness is usually one that follows
after the deepest sorrow. Knowing all these fully well, isn’t it rather unfair,
if not erroneous, that we keep appraising happiness at the expense of sorrow
The role of the
sad moments shouldn’t be limited to complimentary one alone. We need to
understand that happiness and sorrow are two extremes in life and ought to be
balanced to find the best approach towards life itself. The less privilege, I
dare say, is someone who has known only one end of the two extremes all his
life, especially the happy end of the extremes. The pedagogics acquired in the
school of sorrow is greater than that found in any other school of life and
asides looking for a way out, man ought to always seek to understand these
lessons before exiting this ‘privilege’ state in life. The problem is that our
tears dampen our sights while our worries becloud our judegment of the
situation. Oscar Wilde, a man whom
fate taught a great lesson on sorrow towards the end of what was supposed to be
a glorious life, in his famous prison letter- De Profundis, couldn’t
have been more succinct on the reason for the error of judgement regarding
sorrow when he wrote;
“When
we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter
that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasure ‘combs’, but for all
our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may be really
starving the soul.”
And we indeed starve
the soul of the great but usually silent whispers of truth and benefits that
echoes through every difficult circumstances. Mental strength and maturity, for
instance, germinates faster in the rough, turbid but highly nutritiously
fortified soil of sorrow. Usually, it is when life takes the wheels off our
hands and leads us to an unknown and unwanted situation that we really begin to
siphon our most innate strength and sense of responsibility that, in most
cases, we never knew was there. It is when we reach what we thought was our
wits end that we begin to discover a ‘reservoir’ of abilities and dynamism that
has always been in us. Someone who has always lived in the happy end of the
line will never get to discover let alone take advantage of this great truth.
Such a person, in all honesty, can’t create anything lasting for time itself is
a cumbersome but highly proportionate combination of ecstasy and despondency.
Indeed, the most durable success legacies creates room for moments of failure
sadness and sorrow and a wise heart will tell you that the highest disservice
that you can give to your child is to stifle every chance of him getting to
taste the bitter but highly nourishing cake of sorrow.
Moreover, I trust a
tear more than I do a smile. Sorrow brings out the sincerity in man, and as the
witty pen of Oscar Wilde describes
it;
“Behind
joy and laughter, there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But
behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure wears no mask!”
The truth in a man,
the strength of his character, the beauty of his virtues, the stench of his
vices, the fierceness of his temperament, are all too readily revealed under
the dim and subtle but clearly illuminating brightness of sorrow, and as a fish
is not best studied on land but in water, so is the true self in a man best
revealed in the show window of sorrow and not the usually tainted confines of
luxury, comfort and happiness. Happiness has been found to corrupt the soul
more gruesomely than sorrow. That is a fact!
So, as much as I would
like to agree with Ruth’s ideology that perpetual happiness makes everything
better, evidences stating otherwise, some of which are clearly stated here,
seem to seal my mouth in disagreement no matter how hard I try to force them
open. My firm belief is that for every cup of happiness, man needs a teaspoon
of sorrow in order to get a crisp and balanced taste of life. I strongly say,
therefore, that if you want to cheat any soul out of life, deny that soul the
right to sorrow!
Food for thought
‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow?
Who never spent the midnight hours?
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,
—He knows
you not, ye heavenly powers.’
