Let's suppose that you are a fairly normal person and that you retire for the last quarter of your life and are not one of those people who retire at age 27. (I tried retiring when I was 15, but my parents did not approve of my plan.) So you retire closer to the end than the beginning of life and for this reason there are certain events that probably or should bring some kind of sadness. I have detailed some problems of retirement in an earlier blog, but these are issues that lend themselves to sadness:- Friends have died.
- You have some health issues.
- You have less power (at work) than you did.
- Your looks have degraded a bit.
- Your sex life requires a prescription.
- You miss your music being played on the radio.
- You can't remember something that you think you should have remembered.
- You really shouldn't eat shrimp anymore. (for example)
- Your generation is not in charge of popular culture anymore. Your idea of Stranger Things is not accurate.
Wait! There's more!
Yes. And all these bring some level of sadness, or at least poignancy that usually is not as present in life. I would venture to guess, however, that your vision of the classic person on a psychiatrist's couch is not a sad and depressed older person, but an anxious and driven middle-aged person. Why is this?
Sadness is a hard emotion to fix so it makes us nervous. I try to remember to tell people who have to suffer through a line of well wishers at a funeral home that people will say the most terrible things at a funeral because they really don't know what to say. When you are angry about something, there may be a way to change the world to help with or even use that anger constructively. Sadness is a different animal that sometimes just needs tending. How can the church better tend this animal?