Day 314: Sadly Happy, the Bittersweet Moments are the True Gems

I am a fan of old movies. If it’s black and white, stars either of the Hepburns, Bette Davis, or involves those great old musical production numbers I’ll watch it. Today I tuned in for Alice Adams, a 1935 movie with Katherine Hepburn. There’s a line in the movie in which Hepburns’ character says she is sadly happy. When queried she explains that only young children are happily happy. How true. Innocence allows the young to feel the purest of emotions while the rest of us feel shades of those feelings.

It is not possible to be completely happy or sad or anything else really, once you become an adult. So much happens to us throughout our lives that inevitably emotions are tinged with the experiences of our years. Even the best of the best, like love, is tinged with the bite of lost love, rejection or worse. We carry our experiences with us and they color what we do and how we feel. This is not a conscious process, but one we cannot help or escape. When I am happy, truly happy, there is always a moment that I feel the loss of other days that did not end so well. The days that ended in a fight or a break-up linger in the back of the mind and edges of the heart.

Even sadness or depression (not clinical depression) can’t be the only thing you feel. We see too much joy in the world and have happy memories to curb the negative. When a child is upset her feelings are only related to that moment. The fact that she cannot have a cookie is the only thing in her world at that moment and she is thoroughly upset or angry. Grown-ups know there will be other cookies and so even though life gives us lemons, there’s always the promise of future lemonade. Too many clichés, but you get my point.

Life is bittersweet and that “sadly happy” feeling is really the best there is. Without the bitter, we would not know the sweet. I knew my husband was the man I needed and wanted because of all the lost loves of the past. Experience teaches us to recognize what is good and positive in life and without them we might have those pure emotions, but there would be no context. If not having a cookie is as disappointing as losing a loved one, we’d be the worse off for it.