Sadness is the regrettable common denominator of human existence. All of us will experience it, probably more than once. If you’re one of the many who struggle with sadness daily, I’m sorry. One of the great mysteries of the universe is why some of us deal with more loss, loneliness, or despair than others. I don’t have a good answer. 

But I do know that sadness can’t exist without happiness – otherwise existence would be a single dull note and we wouldn’t know the difference. And the thread between sadness and happiness, that tiny but audacious messenger, is hope. 

Hope requires imagination. It requires that we see our sadness from some new vantage or angle. You might think this is naive; my reply is, “Life shouldn’t be any more unbearable than necessary.” Sometimes sadness goes away on its own, but other times we have to lovingly do everything in our power to show it the door.

Many – probably most – of the great poets, novelists, artists, and thinkers of all time endured a great deal of melancholy. It’s mind-boggling how many lost siblings or children prematurely. Or who struggled with lifelong illnesses. Or who were lonely, friendless, unappreciated, adrift. And yet they didn’t curl up and die after the first, second, or even third wave of tragedy. They kept going. They used their art, their ideas, their resources – whatever they had – to make life bearable. Some of them thrived. All of them fought.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these artists and thinkers have also found the most inspiring, hope-centric paradigms to deal with sorrow and darkness. If sadness is a monster that keeps rearing its head, their wise and poetic words are like weapons to soften its blows.

One of these most powerful weapons against despair and sadness is the idea of “transformation.”

“Seasons of the Heart”

I don’t like the word “change”, it’s too sober, but I do like the term “transformation.” And transformation is one of the most hopeful and healthy ways we can look at a tragic (or just plain sucky) phase in life.

The Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran describes the upside of pain and heartache in this surprisingly uplifting way:

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.” ¹

Pain is the unavoidable side effect of growth. It expands our capacity to feel and to wonder. It’s one thing if our pain is chronic to the point of unbearable; that’s a hopeless, irredeemable pain. But the pain that Gibran is referring to is bittersweet: just like the seasons, it comes and goes. Although it hardly feels like it will go away while you’re living through it.

The worst time in my life to date was in my early adulthood. I’m convinced it was so hard because of my lack of perspective up to that point. It was my first winter in a life that had only known spring and a few chilly autumns. I felt old even though I knew I was young. Everything tasted like ash. I didn’t feel like me anymore and wondered if I ever would. Then a final dreaded loss happened at the end of it all and it was like waking up from cryo-freeze. I had broken out of my old shell. I had a bigger and better understanding of life.

Look for the Princess Behind Every Dragon

From 1902 to 1908, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke exchanged letters with a young man named Franz Xaver Kappus. Kappus wanted Rilke to give him constructive feedback on some poems he’d written. Instead, Rilke gave him advice on life.

In response to a letter that Kappus had written in a gloomy, melancholy spirit, Rilke gave some encouragement filled with surprising and thoughtful imagery – including princesses and dragons. In the spirit of adventure, he tells Kappus, “That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us.” ²

Holding onto hope and making sense of our sadness requires imagination. It requires us to see our sadness and our gloom as part of a bigger plan, whether on a cosmic scale or a local one. We are meaning-making machines. If we’re to keep our sanity, not to mention our best shot at happiness, we need to look for any purpose or sense of design that we can in the things that befall us.

“Perhaps all the dragons of our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is, at bottom, the helplessness that seeks our help.”

Rilke goes on to tell Kappus:

“We have no cause to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors they are our terrors; if it has abysses those abysses belong to us, if dangers are there we must strive to love them. And if only we regulate our life according to that principle which advises us always to hold to the difficult, what even now appears most alien to us will become most familiar and loyal. How could we forget those old myths which are to be found in the beginnings of every people; the myths of the dragons which are transformed, at the last moment, into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is, at bottom, the helplessness that seeks our help.” ³

That’s a pretty tall order: to not mistrust the world and to strive to love the terrors and abysses in them.

I doubt that Rilke means we are to love the actual horrible things (and people) that run rampant in this world but to love the challenge that comes with facing the fear and the sadness that these things cause. And it’s impossible to rise to such a challenge, much less love it, without hope.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, in the same spirit as Rilke, “the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” ⁴

Whoever you are, however lonely and pointless you feel your life is, you’re in good company. The very best that history has to offer. And as much as I wish to, I can’t remove your pain and your dragons from you. That you must do for yourself, and surely can do, with hope and courage and patience.

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1. Gibran, K. (2019). The Prophet. Wisehouse Classics.
2. Rilke, R. M. (2017). Letters to a young poet: Translated, with an introduction and commentary by Reginald Snell. Vigeo Press.
3. Ibid. Added punctuation is my own.
4. From her poem, “Wild Geese.”