Sorrow in every form unlocks the heart
But the gathering lacks the courage for the cries.
Disclaimer: The following short essay is NOT an interpretation of Nasir’s verse. It is rather, a series of observations stimulated by the same. The translated version is mine. PS: Alhumdullillah the essay was published by the Daily Dawn's Books & Authors on August 1, 2010.
People avoid being sad and try to keep themselves happy through petty indulgences. They give a similar reaction to others describing their pain. You will notice that the greater a person typically is attracted to leisurely pastimes (such as videogames or instant messaging), the more indifference or irritability they will show on narrations of misery or ‘serious talk’.
Why is sadness so intolerable?
A research once showed that depressed people make more accurate self-assessments than normal people. Normal people’s self-evaluations, general feelings and memory are typically biased to happy beliefs and occurrences. On the other hand, depressed people have a more precise (or rather, relentlessly taxing) idea of their pluses and minuses.
Thus a sad mood focuses our mental spotlight onto our inferiorities – the trash that is ordinarily pushed beneath the carpet – our mistakes, our failures, our humiliations, our embarrassments, our guilts, and our shortcomings and pitfalls.
The process is certainly painful enough to be typically avoided. On the other hand, when one does get really low (or if one is genetically predisposed towards depression), one cannot keep a balance and is caught up in a downward spiral of lowly, belittling and pessimistic self-views that soon generalize on to one’s outlook of the world in general. Even the future, then, looks sealed with gloom.
On the other hand, those that have a wide berth for one-self in one’s heart, those of a tenacious disposition, who place a premium on being real rather than being sentimental, judgmental, pessimistic or optimistic follow onto a different path.
After the initial shock of sadness, these people ultimately move on to the next stage of being low: the valley after the foaming stream – re-analysis. The sad state of mind, by removing the ordinary ‘clouds’ of superficial smugness and assurances, allows one to realize and to accept negative feedback about oneself that one carelessly (or carefully) put off (or avoided) thinking about.
Depending on the mental level of the thinker, at this stage, the thinker comes to relate with similar experiences other people have had, in other families, cultures and locations. Thinkers come to recast their individual tragedies in a more universal light of the common human experiences of abrupt, jerky and thorny path of growth. As such, they derive support and strength. Recalling these observed, heard or read about episodes from the collective human drama, they finds possible alternatives or rather solutions to the ‘problem’ they can no longer postpone solving.
A more sophisticated person’s thought process will lead him (or her) to more philosophical or spiritual conclusions. It is in these moods, that people often realize the smallness of their afflictions or read a hint of the significance of their pain in the context of the larger chain of events.
Such is the process that has been termed in Urdu as IRFAN. Irfan of the Self which has the potential to lead into the next, higher stage: Irfan of the Creator.
Most people, however, do not have the intellectual capacity or the affective disposition to progress through these transcendental stages of Sadness.
Nasir’s shair above points to the common weakness of people, having cast them in the role of audience rather than the sufferer. We can deduce the lengths to which an ordinary sufferer will go in order to avoid ‘reality’, when even a listener cannot put up with the earnest shout of a paining heart.
