There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love.
Washington Irving
Think on what a remarkable thing our human bodies are. They are self-contained powerhouses that, with a little input and very little maintenance, give us seventy or eighty years of experience and emotion and life. Think on the complexity of our bodies. Think on the complexities of our mind.
Imagine you work with a man and you just found out that a proposal for a small project he had worked on wouldn’t be awarded to him. You know he is about to go to lunch with his wife and rather than tell him before lunch, you wait until afterwards so that you don’t spoil his time with his wife. It was a simple little decision over a small triviality in the course of your day. All of the computing power of all of the machines ever assembled by man from the dawn of time to the most advanced computing system today, combined, could not have made that decision. And your mind did it while also controlling your walking and monitoring the input of all your senses.
We are the most wonderful and complex and intelligent machines to ever exist on this planet.
And what do we do when we are quickly overwhelmed with too much anguish or grief or joy or surprise?
We leak.
We cry. We have an uncontrollable response that makes us clog our sinuses up and create pressure in our eyes so that we literally have to cry. And as soon as we start doing it we usually get mad at ourselves for crying; for not being able to control our emotions. We tell ourselves to stop it and to start acting sensibly. In other words we try and tell our bodies to stop doing what we naturally do and to try and start doing something that our “culture” and “society” tell us to do.
We tell these beautiful machines, machines that can effortlessly and seamlessly control the countless little parts of our lives, to stop doing what they naturally do and start doing something that we think it should do. That seems very peculiar.
In the quote above, Washington Irving, the first American man of letters, explains that there is something noble and sacred in our grief and tears. He writes that there is the ability in our marvelous bodies, naturally, to express what all the words we say and actions we do never could.
Perhaps in all the eons that it took our bodies to get this way, to become so perfect that they can easily make a decision that would confound all the machines together, they also figured out perfectly how to grieve. They figured out how to stop us from trying to think too much and express ourselves properly over our loss or our joy and just, simply, cry.
So let your body use the mechanism that it has so perfectly crafted and honed to allow you to express the emotions you could never write or say. Over the next few days, I say let your body do its job. It will do it much better than you ever could.
