Would you try to solve a river?

Someone once asked me about how to solve their sadness. I asked, “Would you try to solve a river?”

Problems are there to be solved; rivers are there to flow. How we see our pain will determine how we respond to it. If we see it as a problem, we will resist it under the guise of solving it—fixing it, changing it, suppressing it, eliminating it. However, if we see pain simply as a feature of existence—an inevitable byproduct of being human—we will allow it to do what it is meant to do: simply flow through us.

Monday afternoon, I kept feeling a tightness in my chest, a fullness in my throat, a throbbing at the back of my eyeballs. In other words, I felt three places in my body where I was damming up the river. Sadness wanted to flow out of me. I didn’t know why.

“My life is great,” I told myself, “what do I have to cry about?”

That argument didn’t help. The pressure grew. It got harder to hold back. I told myself I wasn’t allowed to cry until I understood why I was feeling sad. Understanding was not forthcoming.

Finally, I practiced what I preach.

I opened all three dams. I let the sadness flow forth. It was powerful, certainly more powerful than if I’d let it flow when I first felt it. Sure enough, as it ebbed, I felt better. The levees in me hadn’t broken. Indeed, I felt peaceful. Also, understanding came with the flow.

Monday morning, my son left home again, returning to his life in Chicago.

“It shouldn’t get harder every time,” my mind says. “It should be getting easier. He’s doing great. He’s figuring it out. The family is learning to live without him around. There’s no need for this sadness.” As if sadness about my son growing up and moving on is a sadness that can be solved with a few ‘shoulds’ and a little positive thinking.

However, sadness isn’t a problem, it’s a river.

There’s a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is an inevitable part of being alive; suffering is the preventable part of being alive. Suffering is what we create when we resist our pain, when we don’t let it flow. It’s the depression that can happen if we resist our sadness. It’s the panic that can happen if we resist our fears. It’s the rage that can happen if we resist our anger. It’s the hatred that can happen if we resist our disgust.

I don’t love pain. But if we dare to love our people and our life, we’re going to feel pain. We can dam it up by trying to solve it, or we can let it flow by allowing ourselves to feel it.

Probably, it won’t change anything, except you.