I don’t know if you’ve ever had a pet, but I remember still today the time when I had to accompany my beloved mutt dog, Pepper, to be put down. I remember crying that big gulpy sob. My friend and fellow author, Ryan Berman, who wrote Return on Courage, and who has been a guest on my podcast, recently wrote about how he (and his household) lost Herman, their beloved pooch. [Sorry for your loss, Ryan]. To deal with it, he invoked the wisdom of Dr Seuss:
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
This made me think straight back to my last day with Pepper. And, even as I write, I smile at the memory of her beautiful eyes.
But should one not cry, I wonder? Is it a sign of weakness or a sign of courage to cry? In today’s world, I am genuinely perplexed. Ming-Hui Yuang and Roland Rust have called this, The Feeling Economy. Rene Brown writes about The Power of Vulnerability. But then we have Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff with The Coddling of the American Mind and Nassim Taleb’s Anti-Fragile.
Should we cry or smile?
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I prefer to smile but sometimes it’s easier said then done! So when the emotions stir and the tears may flow, I think it’s healthy to acknowledge your feelings and even healthier to try and smile in between. 🙂
I am with you folks who say both are important. The tears are a way of acknowledging the hurt, the empty space left by losing someone we love. And they needn’t exist without the smiles. I look at it as a shifting in the balance. Our family lost someone very dear to us in March 2020, just before my last child was born. We spent a lot of time in very deep grief, but even on Day 1 we could spare a small fraction of that time smiling at the silly things that made him so amazing, the things we’d miss the most. Now, we do still weep from time to time. We still regret that he is not here to watch the baby grow into the precious little boy he is today and the amazing young man he’s sure to become. I’m tearing up as I write this. But the balance has shifted much more in favor of being grateful we had the time to share with him while he was here.
We should do both, as much as experience warrants. And by that I don’t mean anyone else’s perception of that experience but our own. Only we know how something has moved us, changed us, helped us, touched us. No one else has the right to say whether we should cry or smile or for how long we should indulge either emotion. If we listen, deeply, and allow ourselves the journey, we will know when it’s time to stop crying and start smiling or vice versa. This is how we learn, how we grow.
Do you prefer to smile or cry?
I prefer to smile but sometimes it’s easier said then done! So when the emotions stir and the tears may flow, I think it’s healthy to acknowledge your feelings and even healthier to try and smile in between. 🙂
I am with you folks who say both are important. The tears are a way of acknowledging the hurt, the empty space left by losing someone we love. And they needn’t exist without the smiles. I look at it as a shifting in the balance. Our family lost someone very dear to us in March 2020, just before my last child was born. We spent a lot of time in very deep grief, but even on Day 1 we could spare a small fraction of that time smiling at the silly things that made him so amazing, the things we’d miss the most. Now, we do still weep from time to time. We still regret that he is not here to watch the baby grow into the precious little boy he is today and the amazing young man he’s sure to become. I’m tearing up as I write this. But the balance has shifted much more in favor of being grateful we had the time to share with him while he was here.
Both🤗
We should do both, as much as experience warrants. And by that I don’t mean anyone else’s perception of that experience but our own. Only we know how something has moved us, changed us, helped us, touched us. No one else has the right to say whether we should cry or smile or for how long we should indulge either emotion. If we listen, deeply, and allow ourselves the journey, we will know when it’s time to stop crying and start smiling or vice versa. This is how we learn, how we grow.