On Sadness
Even the most joyful, benevolent souls out there have encountered some degree of sadness in one way or another in their lives. Sadness takes many forms but at its deepest and heaviest it renders us speechless and wrecks havoc on our vision of ourselves and our place in the world. Just like rose-tinted glasses present us with perhaps, delusional but soul satisfying, glowing view of the world where flourishing relationships abound, similarly sadness bestows on us a gravitas and a stillness of soul, where the world is perpetuated by dark clouds and relationships are draining and doomed. Nothing seems right, within us and out there. And at these times when we are our most vulnerable, it really helps to remember that both happiness and sadness are a state of mind. The connection between how we feel and act on any particular day or occasion has a lot to do with what we think and draw conclusions from. And it is all data driven. The data in our brain and the neural synapses it gene...