Sadness as a Tonic for Our Time

In one of the least likely places I ever expected to see it, I saw healthy emotions on display after a recent NFL game.

The Los Angeles Rams had just prevailed over their NFC West division rivals, the Seattle Seahawks, and the players and coaches were greeting each other on the field after the game.

One of the Seahawks players, Cooper Kupp, had become a standout wide receiver for the Rams in the years after he joined them in 2014. He was a joy to watch, not only because of his sneaky talent to get open and gain yards after the catch, but also because of his incredible blocking. His selflessness stood out among receivers who often succumb to the trappings of the attention given to their position.

In the latter part of his tenure with the Rams, Kupp struggled with injuries, and production waned, but he could still contribute at the NFL level and remained a star to his fans and teammates. I don’t know the nuances of personnel decisions in the NFL, but I would guess the Rams traded him to the Seahawks last year because they were rich in receiver talent, especially with the rise of the amazing Puka Nacua. Trading him would probably help the Rams afford players at other positions. So they traded him, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

So in one of the games with the Seahawks this year at the Rams’ home field at SoFi Stadium, it made for an emotional return of Kupp to once again be cheered by his LA fans, and especially to greet his former teammates.

That’s the setting for the video linked below, which shows many, many players and staff taking turns embracing Kupp and whispering in his helmet. I’m biased about football, perhaps, but I think most of us would find this video moving.

What hit me the hardest, though, was the interaction with Kupp’s former coach, Sean McVay. It wasn’t the embrace. It wasn’t the way McVay whispered in Kupp’s ear with his hand gently on the back of the helmet. It was the preceding moment, when McVay, arguably one of the most respected, highest-paid coaches in the NFL, was simply standing there, hands on his hips, patiently waiting his turn. He was just watching, waiting. No one was trying to talk to him. He wasn’t shifting his eyes around to anyone else. He just stood there.

Watching this simple video brought me to tears. It felt good, cleansing, even if just a little.

No, it felt really good.

It was then that I realized I was feeling a feeling, and that I wanted more—more of this sadness, this longing.

So I went online and found another simple video, using an obvious search phrase like “videos that make you sad.” The results were the expected chaotic mix of good and bad content, but it didn’t take long to find another video with one emotionally moving scene after another.

This particular video included scenes of an elderly woman emoting when seeing a young relative after a long separation, a stepson asking his stepfather to adopt him, an African marathoner carrying another runner who had collapsed just before the finish line, and many other unusual and predictable scenes.

What hit me the hardest in this video below, what brought this overly calm, steady, often in his head white American male not just to tears but outright sobs and a snotty, wet face, was the segment of a little boy at his mother’s above-ground grave.

The boy shows up at the grave with his school backpack, reads his schoolwork to her, caresses the name printed on the masonry, and then lays the backpack out as a pillow and takes a nap, like a lion cub after a meal on a warm summer day.

This video will undo you.

But this particular segment didn’t just undo me; it brought a complex, layered set of emotions. If I had to highlight one, it would be this: the boy’s tangible love for his mother. Sure, there might be other things going on with this boy—we have no idea. But I take it at face value, and what I see is a young child pining, longing for, and even basking in his mother’s love—even though she’s not really there as a living human being.

He wants and desires her love; he imagines her care and concern for him, even though he knows she is dead. More than obligatory, filial love, we see a palpable child-to-parent love. How many of us would have been capable of this as children, and how many of us could recognize this for what it is as adults? I wonder.

Let’s think now about both of these different videos. What do we see?

We see sadness, we see mourning, but it isn’t just grief and anxiety; it is a longing, a pining, and a desiring of something, even joy. Even in loss, we feel the feeling of possibility. It’s the human condition that loss and love are a package, perhaps a paradoxical one. But sometimes, unbelievably, we feel neither.

One of the gigantic themes I see in my work on the inner journey of overcoming so much trumped-up religion in the United States is that we, as a people, are living in an alternate, muted, diminished world. And our individual and social experience of that world is one in which we can’t feel what we are supposed to feel. We forget how.

I think these videos remind us that sadness is a tonic for our turbulent time. It’s what nationalists are seeking but can’t quite get a hold of. Sadness is a key to feeling our feelings and making progress on the journey of adapting to our world. Sadness not only shows us what we are missing, but also that we want something, and that somewhere, deep down, we know what we desire, each of us as individuals and together in our communities and nation, where we often struggle to define ourselves. It’s bad when you don’t know who you are or what you want.

Those of us who were especially raised in evangelical-style Christianity are taught that we’re inherently sinful (even though God made us). Tragically, we’re taught to believe this repressive ideology even as little children. But this is not normal, not a healthy way to teach kids to think for themselves and learn on their own what is good and what is bad. As a result, we can’t tell the difference between wanting something, even if you might think it selfish, and not wanting anything at all. Once we begin to gain perspective on how religion can be used to limit who we are, our emotional life can return.

When we as developing humans want something, even if we can’t have it, we have the capacity to go and find what we want and actually can have. If we don’t want anything, we will never discover what we indeed can have.

These videos remind me that I want and need to feel my feelings. Today’s news, whether in the world at large or in our individual lives, is full of sadness. Let’s pause and let the sad news sink in; let’s bring attention to it, and let it be a key to feeling things, and to being reminded of what we love, what we desire, what we want to caress, even if we’re still trying to figure out what that is.