Pure Sadness

Ever so often I get this feeling of pure sadness. I’ll be working and then suddenly I’ll want to listen to a beautiful song, and slowly a feeling of sadness will start flowing through my veins. Whenever this happens, I don’t distract myself with anything. I let it flow through me. I stop doing all my work, postpone my calls, switch off my phone and just sit there idly. I play some music though. Mostly classical. Vivaldi’s four seasons is my first choice, and after that, I either play Schubert’s Serenade or Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat major, or any other such composition, whichever comes in my Youtube recommendations. I feel these compositions understand my emotions better than I do. They complement what I feel. It’s very pretentious but I can’t help it.

Sometimes I’d even listen to some Sufi music like Pir Nizamuddin by Fareed Ayaz or their beautiful rendition of Bhala Hua Mori Gagri Phooti. If I could understand the deeper meanings in paintings, I believe I’d have looked at them as well. Or read about them. But my knowledge limits me. I have tried to understand them but I never could wrap my head around their greatness. I guess it’s a personal choice and maybe some people would find the choice of my music boring. The point is, I try to consume some form of art whenever I feel like this.

This phase of mine, the sadness phase, generally lasts for an hour or two. I sometimes try to write while listening to these compositions. I feel that anything I’d write during this time would be gold. It never is, but while writing I feel what I am writing really is gold. If you think about it, this is very narcissistic. Even I think so. But during that time, I let the golden words and sentences type themselves out via my fingers. I have promised myself to never publish what I write during that time. And I haven’t. Yet. I never read those notes afterward, as I fear that if they are substandard, I’d never be able to enjoy my sadness. Enjoy my sadness. Hah. I don’t know how to explain that phrase now. But I have a hunch you will get it. It’s a beautiful feeling is all I can say. 

Today, when I was working, if you can call writing deplorable 30-second ad scripts for YT ads work that is, I suddenly felt this sadness flowing through me. I had to write some five scripts and I was on the fourth one, so I thought I’d finish my work and then listen to Vivaldi and enjoy. But that didn’t happen. What happened instead was I wrote a really sad fifth script and went into an existential crisis. I didn’t play any songs. I just kept thinking about stuff. Anything and everything. Infinity and beyond. The past and the future. The duality of things. Thought so much that I almost decided to shift to a different country and start a new career there.

Have you ever felt that? This desire to go to an unknown land and start everything afresh?  I guess everyone feels that when they are overwhelmed by the present. I sometimes wonder if it is normal to feel overwhelmed every day. Is it? And it’s not that something great is happening and I am overwhelmed by that. It’s just the everyday things. To suppress these feelings, I take walks. My walks are very random. I’d be walking and suddenly I’ll take a left turn and then a right and then I’d find myself standing at a completely new location. Isn’t it amazing how you can feel lost while being just a few meters from home? For a few minutes, you are in a completely new territory, all on your own, and you have to navigate your way through it. A little adventure in the day. Marco Polo-esque feeling in this concrete jungle. But I am running out of new locations now. Hence, I have started to think of taking an auto and going a little farther away from home to take my walks. Is it weird? I don’t know. But this is what makes me feel normal, so maybe I should do it.

As I was writing all this, I played Mozart’s symphony number 40 in G minor or Great G minor symphony as it’s commonly known. I think it’s very good. Too good. I can never understand how all of these compositions have stayed relevant even after so long. It’s remarkable and I feel we never appreciate such small things that this world offers us every day. I will press like on this youtube video once I finish writing this. It’s my way of paying respect to Mozart. Good job, buddy, here take my like. I feel I wasted my sadness today on a stupid youtube ad. I don’t know when it will be back, but I will try not to waste it again whenever it comes. I have now started to appreciate the feeling of pure sadness. I think that’s a level up in life.