New Leaf

Our quest for happiness is all consuming. In the process, we find ourselves doing things that are contrary to human experience. We try to shut out all things sad and unhappy and end up doing funny or weird things. Society would have us believe that sadness is unnatural and loss has no place in our lives when it is actually all around us. New age spiritual gurus, friends and well wishers exhort us to move on and not let anything get between us and our smiles. But, experts say that some degree of sadness actually aids imagination and creativity. The sudden loss of a loved person shipwrecks lives, and we are left to gasp in the choppy waters of grief and yet people expect us to come up smiling. So we try to cushion ourselves with whatever we can find, because sadness disintegrates and then decays us. Sadness is like compost which coaxes the new leaf to come out. In moderate doses, it makes us rich with experiences and gets us ready for a new life, on the long road ahead.