Cry

Is there any such thing as a bad cry? I always feel better after I've cried. It's like all the fears and the anxieties -- all the negative emotions I feel and struggle with -- leave my body with the water running down my cheeks. Tears -- metaphorically at least -- are God's gift to the world. People who don't or can't cry damage themselves.

I don't cry often, but when I do, I usually have a soundtrack. A song or a piece of music plays in the background and I focus on it like an object of meditation. Sometimes I put on a song with the specific purpose of making myself cry. Sometimes the tears come as a surprise as the beauty of a lyric or a combination of notes engages my memory or emotions.

When my dad died, I cried a lot. Big loss, big tears, I guess. As I sat in the “grieving” room, waiting for the doctor to come and tell me the specifics of his passing, a song, as if on cue, began to play on the hospital intercom. It was Judy Collins' My Father, a song that had made me cry before, even without the events of the day or the amazing irony of the moment.

Love makes me cry more than any other thing. Sometimes I think that love -- in its various incarnations -- is the only thing we ever cry about. The loss of it. The lack of it. The mystery of it. The tragedy of it. And it doesn't even have to be my own tragedy. Other people's pain affects me almost identically. I make others' pain my own and I cry for both them and myself. It's all very cathartic.

I suppose one could argue that laughter operates on the human nervous system in much the same way as tears. A good laugh is equally as cleansing as a good cry, especially if it follows a good cry. And I've laughed about love as much as I've cried over it.