In the Greek pantheon of emotions, Love has the power of Zeus, Compassion is the lovely Aphrodite, and Anger kicks butt like Ares—but Sadness? He’s just a hated Cyclops, weeping out of that one ugly eye, a monster that nobody likes at all.

Sadness is the emotion that Americans like to eliminate right away. If our children are sad, we try to fix them with candy and distractions. If our best friend has the blues, we invite him to Happy Hour. A spouse feeling down? Well, here’s some shopping money, a round of golf, maybe a massage. We are uncomfortable with sadness; it’s such a downer to everyone in its radius.

Poets seem to understand the beauty of sadness better than the rest of us, but some are really just happy pretending they are sad. Bands like Atreyu (who sing lines like It only hurts when I breathe) capitalize on youthful angst with an almost self-conscious joy, and when the Smiths sing  My gut is burning.  Won't you find me some water? / Hey,just forget it . . . Can you bring me gasoline?  their hyper-tragic lines betray a twisted kind of happiness

Yet John Donne, a profound 16^th century metaphysical poet whom I reckon never wore an emo haircut or painted his fingernails black, wrote “Affliction is a treasure and scarce any man hath enough of it.”  I believe he was closer to getting at the real paradox of sadness: that when we try to kill suffering too quickly, we short circuit the natural order of things.

And what is the natural order of things? It’s first moving in rhythm to Ecclesiastes chapter 3, where there is a time for everything under the sun. It’s experiencing both suffering and joy, the juxtaposition of which ultimately defines both. It’s found in the book of James which makes the audacious claim, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

The sun was shining bright and my post-yoga-class limbs were loosened-up for a new day. The better news though, was that while leaving the studio I’d acquired a new mat.

“Finders keepers, losers weepers,” I sung in my head. “So-long $19.99 sucker from Target that always makes me slip.” This new mat is posh and sturdy and made in Malaysia.  My soundtrack was cut-short though, when bragging of the story to my sister Courtney the next day.

“You what!? You took that from the lost and found, Abb…what are you thinking!? That’s somebody else’s mat…good mat…and they’re probably a wreck about losing it.”
“Umm…oh…I…uh, thought you’d be excited. I was thinking that somebody lost something, and I found it, so now it’s mine. Their loss, my gain kinda thing?”