if I skip my eyes over the seas of my life
and choose only to dance on the shore
then, at the end, having ignored my strife
I will not have known there was more.
when, in the world, happiness is reward
we forget the true value of sadness
throttled about in a storm, we whirl
half blind and half crazed in our madness.
If I am concerned primarily with gladness
if I try to have hills but not valleys,
at the end I will not show any success
it will all be plains and not mountains.
If I focus only on good moments and their counting
I will lose the good gap that lies between
for even in thunder, in breaking, in shouting
in hot blasts of ignited gasoline-
even in losses, in war and in ravines
the world knows its weight, don't pretend.
Our lives, you see, would not be complete
had they not been destroyed by their end.
We live as though our hopes will extend
through countless ages of life
but the truth is, the dark we must strive to accept
for without it, we could not see the light.
Not about the dark as in sin, which we must strive to remove from our lives. The dark here is pain and suffering that are inevitable. This isn't about accepting your flaws but rather acknowledging that your life is not whole if you merely chase after happiness the whole time. In fact, I wouldn't suggest accepting your flaws. We should always be improving ourselves. But with this in mind, improving ourselves doesn't mean our lives will get automatically better. As long as there are things worth losing, there will be pain. And that pain is worth feeling. I want to encourage everyone to feel their lives for everything they are in order to be whole. Likewise, sadness is not valuable in and of itself but rather it is important in contrast and in the context of your whole life. If you are focused too much on sadness, your life is out of balance just as much if you focus too much on happiness. In order to be a whole person we must acknowledge that sadness is worth feeling because it means something is important to us. Our focus must be on the improvement of ourselves and those things that are important to us. Emotions exist alongside our journey. They do not direct it. But they are still worth feeling. All of them.