Be honest with me.
Have you ever found yourself using your sadness as an excuse for not taking action?
I don't mean to be unsympathetic.
Sadness, pain and grief are very real.
Recent studies have shown that grief has some of the same physiological effects as physical pain.
A person's sadness is not something to be dismissed, underestimated or ignored.
However, what I want to look at here, is that line where sadness becomes something other than an inevitable part of the healing process, or a natural response to particular circumstances.
I want to identify if and where sadness is being used as an excuse to avoid taking positive action.
This matters, I believe, because there seem to be so many mental blocks one may adopt to avoid taking action.
Positive, forward action, for all it's obvious benefits, seems to strike hesitancy into many of us, much of the time?
Is this because we don't truly believe ourselves to be worthy of the results this action may bring?
Are we scared to be happy?
Or are we just lazy?
Either way, there appears to be a multitude of opportunities out there which we can use to distract ourselves from taking positive action: television box-sets, making a cup of coffee, enrolling on a three year University course.
I'd like to know if sadness has ever become one of the tools on this list.
I ask this of you, because if you fall into using sadness this way, might it not prolong this sadness?
Surely another box set would be a less painful excuse to avoid taking positive action than this prolonged pain.
And if we can tackle and such excuse making at the level of sadness, and learn to take positive action despite our pain, surely we can do so in all areas of our life.
And surely we can leave our pain behind.