How to beat sadness

Last week I told you that Allahﷻ prohibited sadness. That sounds unreasonable and you may say, ‘I don’t want to feel sad. But I do. So, why is sadness prohibited?’ We are conditioned to see emotions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. The reality is that emotions are value neutral. They are neither positive nor negative. But what we do with emotion can make it positive or negative. So, while we don’t have control over the emotion, we have total control over what we choose to do thereafter. For example, people say, ‘Don’t get angry.’ That is as unreasonable as saying, ‘Don’t feel hungry or thirsty.’ In Ramadan we feel hungry and thirsty, but we choose to ignore it to please Allahﷻ. We may feel angry with someone, but we choose to control our anger for the same reason. Someone may come to us with gossip, or we may have the urge to backbite someone, but we stop ourselves because backbiting is destructive and like all destructive things, is Haraam. In the case of sadness and grief, to feel it shows that we are human and that our hearts are alive. But to allow ourselves to get bogged down in it is our choice. We can equally easily choose to break out of it.

For example, upon facing bereavement, we can either fall into depression or despair. Or we can choose to be grateful to Allahﷻ for having granted us the company of that friend for the duration that we were together. We can recall and relive the beautiful memories of our time together and pray for them and give charity to benefit them. If we lose our job, we can choose to see it as an opportunity to become entrepreneurs which most people in jobs declare to be their aspirational goal but do nothing to achieve it, until one day they find themselves looking at their office building without their passkey. If we face a financial loss or lose a relationship which is far more serious than financial loss, we can choose to analyze what went wrong and learn lessons from it to prevent it happening a second time. In all these cases and more, we will feel sad, but what we choose to do with that will spell the difference between happiness and gaining wisdom or wasting a life opportunity.

Sadness is prohibited for two other reasons. When our sadness turns morbid and is more than is normal in a situation, it means that we have not recognized the truth of the matter. And that truth is what Allahﷻ told us:

مَا عِندَكُمْ يَنفَدُ وَمَا عِندَ ٱللَّهِ بَاقٍ وَلَنَجْزِيَنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ صَبَرُوٓا۟ أَجْرَهُم بِأَحْسَنِ مَا كَانُوا۟ يَعْمَلُونَ

Nahl 16: 96    Whatever you have will end, but whatever Allah has is everlasting. And We will certainly reward the steadfast according to the best of their deeds.

How can you grieve or regret losing something you didn’t own in the first place? It was not yours. So, how can you say that you lost it? You had been given that person or situation or experience or thing in trust as a gift temporarily. When that period ended, it went back to its real owner, Allahﷻ, who is also our owner and to whom we will also return. When we remember this, loss turns to gain and sadness to gratitude. We become thankful for what we’d had, instead of feeling sad for what we think we lost.

The second bigger problem with prolonged sadness is that it takes away the desire to go forward in life. If you allow yourself to fall into that trap, you become morose, withdrawn and depressed. This is unique to sadness. With other emotions which are considered negative, it doesn’t happen. Anger can energize you to solve a problem or to ensure that a criminal is punished. Fear is a universal motivator to greater effort and in the right dose, it brings the world around you, alive. I recall with great happiness my wanderings in Indian and South American jungles, home to tigers, leopards, bears, elephants, jaguars, anacondas, and other highly dangerous animals. But being in the forest always made me feel more alive, aware, and appreciate my surroundings and gave me tremendous...