Wednesday 3rd December

Is it only me, or is this a shared phenomenon; I suspect and am fairly sure of the latter, else there wouldn’t be so many.  Sad songs and stories, I mean.  Maybe leavened by a glimmer of mild happiness at the end, but essentially miserable, often heartbreakingly sad.  Like most people, when the mood takes me I like an upbeat number, something to dance to, or at least tap ones feet to, but give me a slow sad song and I am at my happiest.  For me, I think, it is the shared experience I am longing for.  For all our community, our living with people, our shared lives in public – we are still essentially alone.  We are taught from an early age not to relate all of our thoughts, that which is inappropriate, not for common consumption and we keep those thoughts inside.  When we cry, we are shushed better and told we are all right now; the pain not addressed but brushed aside, and so we continue to function as reasonable adults.  Men especially, learn early on, that no-one is actually interested in your deeper sadder thoughts and so we keep them to ourselves or maybe consign them to poems written late at night and never shown to anyone.

And then you hear a song of loneliness or longing or unrequited love and the heart opens and a flood of emotion is released, your eyes moisten and you revel in a communion of shared feeling.  This is what it means to be a person, to be able to empathise, to understand that actually you are not alone.  In our selfish self-obsessed lives we need to stop and listen to each other a bit more.  Humans are really loving caring animals – under all the bullshit.  And sad songs and words of sorrow allow us to feel human, to be ourselves, to understand each other, to share a moment of togetherness.