Name: The Benefits of Crying
Uploaded: 2020-10-14T20:00:21.000Z
Duration: 5 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

One of the wisest things about young children is that they have no shame or compunction

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whatsoever about bursting into tears, perhaps because they have a more accurate and less

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pride-filled sense of their place in the world: they know they are extremely small beings

in a hostile and unpredictable realm, that they can't control much of what is happening

around them, that their powers of understanding are limited and that there is a great deal

to feel distressed, melancholy and confused about. Why not then, on a fairly regular basis,

sometimes for only a few moments at a time, collapse into some highly salutary sobs at

the sheer scale of the sorrow of being alive? Unfortunately, such wisdom tends to get lost

as we age. We get taught to avoid being, at all costs, that most apparently repugnant

(and yet in fact deeply philosophical) of creatures: the cry-baby. We start to associate

maturity with a suggestion of invulnerability and competence. We imagine it may be sensible

to imply that we are unfailingly strong and in command of what is going on.

But this is, of course, the height of danger and bravado. Realising one can no longer cope

is an integral part of true endurance. We are in our essence and should always strive

to remain cry-babies, that is, people who intimately remember their susceptibility to

hurt and grief. Moments of losing courage belong to a brave life. If we do not allow

ourselves frequent occasions to bend, we will be at great risk of one day fatefully snapping.

We labour under the misapprehension that the only thing that could justify tears would

be one clear and unambiguous catastrophe. But that is to forget how many miniscule elements

go wrong every hour, how much supposedly 'small things' can impact us and how extremely

heavy they may end up feeling in a bewilderingly short time.

When the impulse to cry strikes us, we should be grown-up enough to consider ceding to it

as we knew how to in the sagacity of our fourth or fifth years. We might repair to a quiet

room, put the duvet over our heads and give way to unrestrained torrents at the horribleness

of it all. We easily forget how much energy we normally have to expend fending off despair;

now at last we can properly allow despondency to have its way. No thought should be too

dark any more: we are obviously no good. Everyone is evidently extremely mean. It's naturally

far too much. Our life is – undoubtedly – meaningless and ruined. If the session

is to work, we need to touch the very bottom and make ourselves at home there; we need

to give our sense of catastrophe its fullest claims.

Then, if we have properly done our work, at a point in the misery, some idea – however

– minor will at last enter our minds and make a tentative case for the other side:

we'll remember that it would be quite pleasant and possible to have a very hot bath, that

someone once stroked our hair kindly, that we have one and half good friends on the planet

and an interesting book still to read – and we'll know that the worst of the storm is

the needs of childhood constantly thrum within us. We are never far from craving to be held

and reassured, as we might have been decades ago by a sympathetic adult, most likely a

parent, who made us feel physically protected, kissed our forehead, looked at us with benevolence

and tenderness and perhaps said not very much other than, very quietly, 'of course'.

To be in need (as it were) of mummy is to risk ridicule, especially when we are a couple

of meters tall and in a position of responsibility. Yet to understand and accept one's younger

longings in fact belongs to the essence of genuine adulthood. There is in truth no maturity

without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a proper grown-up who

does not frequently yearn to be comforted like a toddler.

In sensible households, we should all have signs, a bit like the sort they have in hotels,

that we can hang on our doors and announce to passers by that we are spending a few minutes

inside doing something essential to our humanity and inherently connected to our capacity to

live like a grown-up: sobbing like a lost child.

Our Emotional Barometer is a tool that can help us to more clearly explain our moods.  Click the link on screen now to find out more.