Meditation on Sadness

A low sun, milky, through bare trees, shedding leaves, brown, yellowing, and lying on the ground; fountains playing, cold, white, splashing - it is Autumn in Russell Square; bright but cold. One South American friend commented, surprisedly, on how it could be, at the same time, both sunny and freezing. And today is the first time this autumn that it's felt bitter, hurting my ears as I cycle through the city.

This season is a sign of the cyclical nature of life, of existence: birth, life and death - via the inevitable stage of decay. A suitable backdrop to Remembrance Day yesterday, which invariably also prompts thoughts of others who've died, outside of war, and reflect on mortality as such, especially for those growing older in years.

But, of course, war is precisely not part of the natural cycle, but rather an abrupt interruption to it, cutting short lives, which otherwise would gradually unwind, fade. Excising, curtailing, also the dreams and hopes of those left behind. So the beauty of life, in nature and in human beings, who are after all part of nature, is also necessarily projected onto the bacground of its transience, its eventual finality. Sadness and beuaty are essentially interlinked.

The Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi captures this accurately. The presence of sadness is an aspect of, not a contrast to, the experience of beauty. The short-lived quality of all things is intrinsic to their loveliness; our appreciation of them must take this into account. For them, however, it is the spring which stands in for our own autumnal feeling; an altogether more attractive vista, compared to our drab, wet, melancholy season. Hence the Spring Festival of the blossom in Japan, when people drink beer under the trees in parks throughout the country. Although undeniably pretty, the pink blossoms last only a short while, and this is considered part of the value placed on them by a culture that savours impermanence. 

It is, I understand, a Buddhist meditation exercise to contemplate our own death. Pascal, that idiosyncratic French thinker, also compares our existence to that of man in a cell, waiting for his execution, who seeks various distractions, divertissements, instead of facing up to his own soon demise. And Scripture too exhorts us, to number our days; instead of escaping into the distractions of consumption ('when the going gets tough the tough go shopping'), or media entertainment (an African friend commented on how much time affluent Europeans spend on being 'entertained').