How looking forward helped me leave sadness in the past

While cheerfulness is a valued trait in modern life, humans can’t avoid melancholy, especially when the world can seem so horrible, writes Angela Mollard. Here’s why we should embrace the darkness.

It’s not often I feel absolutely awful.

The kind of awful where you don’t want to answer the phone. The awful where that lunch with friends would necessitate you cutting out a fake smile and pasting it to your face and so you cancel.

The awful where the world feels so broken that even if you tried to piece it back together with gold, you’d still see the scars not the shine.

It’s so unfamiliar to me that I can only presume this melancholy is a confluence of the external and the internal.

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It’s the details that are unravelling me: the little girl shot in the face in the Christchurch massacre; the rich and already privileged cheating to get their kids into college; the families of those killed in the Ethiopian Airlines crash denied the dignity of taking their dead home.

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There’s some misfortune in my own world too: a brother facing six months of intensive therapy after nearly cutting his hand off with a drop saw; a dear friend suffering from a nasty fallout with his parents; another friend with cancer.

To try to shift the sadness I went for a walk only to return to an email from a reader detailing why my columns “irritate” her. Mostly I ignore these rare missives but in less robust moments they sting.

People across New Zealand observe the Muslim call to prayer as the nation reflects on the moment when 50 people were slaughtered in Christchurch. Picture: AP Photo/Vincent Thian

In any case, I suspect most of us brush up against this particular species of sadness every so often so I’m going to plough on here in the hope there may be some universal in the personal.

Melancholy, I’ve learned, smells like damp washing that’s been left in the machine too long. It is colours made sepia and rain for days and a heart you couldn’t carry if you tried to lift it out of your chest. I suspect it’s less something you work through and more something that works through you.

Because my only experience of melancholy is via forced studying of consumption-ridden poets I went in search of what it means.

The School of Life, so accurate in the distilling of humanity and emotion, says it’s not a disorder that needs to be cured. Rather, “it is a tender-hearted, calm, dispassionate acknowledgment of how much pain we must inevitably all travel through.”

While buoyancy and cheerfulness are the valued traits in modern life, the School sees it as a gift that makes us more compassionate and forgiving and less vengeful.

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After three days of feeling subdued and mainlining Joni Mitchell, I did several things that helped. I accepted rather than fought the discomfort and calmly decided to wait it out. I sought out quiet yet soldering experiences and so when the two deckhands on the ferry both failed to lasso the wharf bollards with their ropes I laughed along with them.

I opened Modern Delight, a collection of funny and whimsical essays, and smiled at actor Bill Nighy’s musings on what makes him happy, among which “a cafe run with real commitment”, “a woman with no handbag”, “Stevie Wonder on harmonica” and “anyone doing the splits”.

In the same collection the author Michael Morpurgo writes an ode to Sundays: “A hot bath, a warm bed next to a warm body that fits.”

Actor Bill Nighy has a fabulous way of finding delight in the strange simplicity of everyday. Picture: Love Actually

Rather than ignore the cause of my melancholy, I acknowledged it. I messaged my brother about his hand and commiserated with him that he now cannot do the things he loves: play rugby, ride his motorbike and finish building his house.

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I spent a long time looking at a profound newspaper cartoon on the New Zealand shooting where the artist had drawn a silver fern with each leaf representing a person of a different faith praying to their God.

To contain the surfeit of feeling I tried to be deliberate and present. Walking into the house, I chose to notice the gorgeous hibiscus at the front door and thought back to when my mum had bought one for each of my daughters to plant outside their bedroom windows.

I made a chocolate slice for my child suffering from tonsillitis and a minestrone soup for a friend with pneumonia.

I wrote with my best pen — the one I don’t want to run out of ink — and I used the fluffiest towel I own simply because I wanted the comfort of it.

Fortuitously, I also watched Ricky Gervais’s After Life which is the funniest, most affecting and original television I’ve seen in years. If melancholy makes you feel as if you’re wading through treacle, Gervais’s Tony is dragging himself through razor blades.

Finally, I looked forward. This coming week I’m seeing an old friend, interviewing someone fabulously interesting and launching Turia Pitt’s brilliant new book for teenagers, Good Selfie.

Honestly, if anyone can make you feel better about the human condition it’s that woman.

Yet she, too, has days marbled with melancholy. Flicking through her goldmine of a book I found this advice: “If you’re ever feeling really ‘ugh’ find a way to give back.”

She’s right. It works.

@angelamollard