Dear Friend,
I came across this line in a book the other day:
“Somewhere after being sorry, there has to be another day…”.
It’s a quote from Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, a novel about several generations of a Korean family living in Japan that spans the 20th century. It's a novel about being the outsider. The quote pertains to a middle-aged woman, Etsuko, who feels she has failed as a mother to her troubled teenage daughter Hana, a girl who took after her mother’s defiant and independent soul and died as a young woman of AIDS. Shame, regret, and sorrow over her daughter are always with Etsuko. One day Etsuko was in the kitchen talking to her boyfriend’s son Solomon, whose own mother died when he was just 3 years old, and he told her, quite unexpectedly, that she was like a mother to him and that’s how he saw her. She thought of him as a good kid and never thought of having played a role herself in that, and it sparked a deep emotional response within her. That’s when the author gives the line “somewhere after being sorry, there has to be another day…”.
It’s actually part of a longer complex sentence that reads as the following:
“Somewhere after being sorry, there has to be another day, and even after a conviction, there could be good in the judgement.”
That’s nice isn’t it? Though for me the first half of that sentence is enough:
“Somewhere after being sorry, there has to be another day…”.
I couldn’t be any more different than a divorced Korean woman with a troubled daughter living in Japan 40 years ago. I heard those words while on my daily walk listening to the audiobook read by Sandra Oh. I felt those emotions described to Etsuko well up inside of me. It was a bit awkward because I was passing through a tough part of the neighborhood by the liquor store where men hang out gambling over dice on the sidewalk. Nonetheless it opened up in me a feeling that there too must be a day after my own sorrow and shame that I have held onto for so long. It made me think that deep feeling of sorrow that clouds the day and night for weeks and even years on end, as it did for Etsuko, are not meant to last forever.
We experience sorrow as a part of a range of human emotions. No other emotion lasts forever so why should sorrow? Sorrow is useful. I suspect in an evolutionarily way it helps maintain social groups that is at the core of the specie’s survival. It regulates behavior so not to repeat past mistakes and, when expressed, it builds trust it won’t happen again. Besides, and maybe more importantly, sorrow, and sadness too, creates the most beautiful art, the most beautiful music, the most beautiful poetry, the most beautiful needlecraft, and the most beautiful baking, and it lays the best ground for one’s growth if tended to. Life without sorrow would be so meaningless.
Unless, that is, we hold on to sorrow forever. My acupuncturist says holding on to any emotion for too long creates blockage and inhibits the life force that flows through the body. I think emotions are like the weather: pockets of air governed by the movement of high and low pressure that results in some days being sunny and some days not so much. They dance with each other and the key, and I don’t really know if there is a key, is to let the emotions come and go just like the sun and storm clouds.
Before the sun rose this morning I woke up in the darkness with that all so familiar feeling of dread. There was really no reason for it other than I suspect a touch of loneliness during the holidays. I once heard a teacher from the Bay Area Zen Center say when you wake up in the middle of the night with that gut wrenching feeling that that is the best time to meditate. To sit quietly with it and look at it face-to-face. Not to run from it. But to let it in and just be with it. This morning I did just that and I knew the feeling would pass. It did and after drinking a strong cup of green tea at breakfast I felt life, once again, was great. I also told myself that this too will pass.
I guess the transformation of sorrow is turning it into regret. This could be controversial because some say to live life without regrets. But I don't subscribe to that notion. Not a regret that elicits a strong emotional reaction and cripples. But a regret that silently reminds you that you wish you handled something better and hope you will in the future.. The regret you’ve integrated into your understanding of past mistakes and lessons and realize that you too are human.
A handful of these regrets circulate through my mind now and then. A couple go back 30 years, others 20 and 10 years, and another more recently. They all involve how I treated someone at the time. Some of them, well maybe all of them, are still unresolved and they can be like ghosts that visit in the middle of the night. I would like to resolve them, but sometimes I’m scared to and sometimes it’s just not possible and sometimes it's not quite right for the other person involved. This has been one of the deepest lessons of my life. Not everything gets resolved. Not everything works out. But you have to move on and know there is a time for the sorrow to pass.
Let the sorrow become that regret that you put into a box, like that shoe box of old letters up in the closet, you can return to when needed. And know…that after being sorry, there has to be another day.
That’s the power of literature.
Well friend, I must be off now. I'll write again soon and hope to hear from you too. Happy new year and until next time be well.
Your friend,
Mitch Jeserich
