Inevitable Sorrows
— WORD FOR THE DAY — for today, August 21, 2025, on Grateful Living.
By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.
-Sharon Salzberg-
Part of our collective story is how to meaningfully hold grief and hope, acknowledging what cannot be changed and still envisioning all that can.
-Carrie Newcomer-
Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?
-Ross Gay-
The — WORD FOR THE DAY — for today, August 21, 2025 on Grateful Living is from Sharon Salzberg. It continues a theme running through other recent daily quotes from Carrie Newcomer and Ross Gay. This idea of holding joy and sorrow, grief and gratitude, side by side, near to each other and near to our own hearts.
Whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, this range -from pleasure to pain, elation to deflation- is always more neighborly than distant. Even if we drive a wedge between them with denial, or compartmentalizing, or tuning out our genuine emotions, they still emerge as close relatives.
It is one of the most significant lessons that grateful living practices have taught me and continue to teach me. Life is precious and fragile, ever-evolving, dynamic far more than static. When we pay attention, fully aware in a moment, it is also absolutely amazing., full of awe, incredulous. When life, other people, nature, and circumstances wow us, it is a reality that tomorrow, or next month, or next year, they may also leave us, disappoint us, cause us pain.
As humans, we tend to not appreciate what we think will always be here, what we have gotten used to having. Depreciation is a sorrow in itself. Fresh curiosity on a new morning is simple joy. Brother David Steindl-Rast describes it like this (my paraphrase)—though there are things we aren’t going to be (and shouldn’t be) grateful for, we can find gratitude in each moment, and that moment can create opportunity and hope. I call it generating good energy. That good energy is available to help me move through the challenges, not gloss them over.
This tree, just a few feet from me off of our deck, was bare a few months ago. We have enjoyed the color, shade and privacy it has offered over the summer. We will enjoy the colors of fall and the tree will again be bare and appear lifeless for a time. Ever-evolving. I love to watch the seasons change and I get a front row seat sitting in a chair on my deck.
Today, the tree is full of life, waving gently in an early morning breeze. There is simple joy in my heart for simply being here. Not a bad way to start the day. Onward!
