Understanding Waves

We can’t always be up.

I think we all know this, but I’m not sure we all believe it or genuinely understand what it means. We can’t always be up which means that sometimes we have to be down.

In our label-obsessed era, we tend to define any and all negative emotions as problematic. Every bout of sadness becomes a labelled issue. There are many of us who give ourselves the title of depression just because we’re feeling sad more often. I know countless people who tell themselves that they have an anxiety disorder just because they get anxious frequently in appropriate situations. Because we don’t understand our emotions properly, we overestimate the longevity of negative feelings.

Our emotions are like waves. Which means sometimes we’ll get huge crashing ones that knock us down, and sometimes the water will be calm. Whatever way these waves come, no wave lasts forever. It swells and crashes and intensifies and then it’s gone just as soon as it arrived. Our emotions are like waves because no single emotion has the power to last forever. Even tsunami waves end.

And so if you happen to be feeling negative emotion now, and you feel that it will never go away, understand this wave. Accept the reality of your situation and take solace in the fact that no emotion has ever lasted forever in the past, and that this is unlikely to change now.

Waves come and go. You are not the waves. You are the ocean within which waves operate. They do no control you.

Drink water,

Daragh