In which sadness serves a purpose

It’s one of those weekend afternoons when the garden is almost too beautiful. Too much. I sit here under a blanket on a deck chair in the blustery wind, trying to write, but all the songbirds have forgotten I’m here and they’re putting on a show. Robins, tits, dunnocks, wrens, starlings seethe around the feeders, splash in the fountains. In the terraces beyond, the sun is too bright to make out more than a rainbow blur of blooming.

Everything feels touched by sadness: cherry blossoms ripped prematurely off their branches and falling like rose confetti. A once-perfect orange tulip, sagging and dishevelled. Ovoid pink magnolia petals scattered across the newly sown vegetable beds. Even the fresh green tree leaves, soft as a baby’s skin, seem coded with their inevitable senescence, already foreshadowing the tired and dusty look they’ll adopt in high summer.

Of course the sadness is not an intrinsic part of these things I see. The sadness is firmly in me today, and has been these past few weeks, a filter through which all else is processed.

I am not talking about depression: to my knowledge, I have never suffered from that particular malady. My occasional low moods are not crippling, and I can bear them with little effort. Like many other people, I suppose, sadness is something that just happens from time to time. There is usually not a cause I can pinpoint. Probably it is physiological: insufficient sleep, or the aftermath of a solid stretch of excessive stress, or the consequences of sometimes being too busy to eat properly. Or there is a triggering event that on the face of it seems trivial, except perhaps it synergises with a memory of another time when something more serious was afoot, and my brain cannot tease them apart, decanting the past into the present. Sometimes I wake from tragic dreams, but while the feeling lingers, the story behind it slips away just out of reach.

There is also, of course, the ticking clock. Aging increasingly makes me feel existential. My son and I were once part of the same body, glowing and heavy with possibility, but now, his rushes towards independence and a seemingly infinite future, while mine slips away from me, becoming something foreign and strange as my own future telescopes ever more tightly closed.

Sadness can be many things. But today, I’m thinking about sadness as fuel.

In my life, I’ve been privileged to have experienced several protracted periods of sadness that catalysed a major espisode of artistic creativity and productivity. These were not merely casual “suffering to sing the blues” moments, but months of blistering fire.

The most prominent of these was when I was made redundant from the biotech company in the Netherlands. After an entire lifetime of working insanely hard to pursue my dream of being a scientist, I was suddenly wholly unoccupied, home alone and on the dole. In short, I went from sixty to zero so fast that you could almost hear the cartoon screeching, see the black marks stretching out on the road behind.

After such a shock to the system, not being sad would have been inappropriate. For a few weeks, I did hardly anything, retreating into myself and trying to work out how I could regroup and carry forward with my life. But then something strange happened, strange and wonderful. I’d been writing before that time, but suddenly, writing was all that I could do. I wrote the moment I woke up, I wrote all day, I even woke in the middle of the night to scribble notes in a pad beside my bed.

The rare few times I was coaxed away to do something social, a situation where I couldn’t turn to my laptop or where it would be rude to daydream about plots, I deeply resented the intrusion. The only exceptions were activities that fed the creative fire: novels, poetry and art that resonated rather than distracted. I remember almost having a religious experience at a pre-Raphaelite exhibition in Groningen called “Fatale Vrouwen”, and being so devastated by the ending of His Dark Materials that I couldn’t function for a few days. For my own solitary writing breaks, I’d pace a habitual quadrant near my flat in De Pijp: north along the River Amstel, across the Nieuwe Amstelbrug, south on the other bank and then across the Berlagebrug home. Walking past the houseboats on the Weesperzijde, with their tidy flower gardens, entire scenes of dialogue would channel through me like my own conscious brain was surplus to requirements. The characters didn’t just have a life of their own: I was sharing my body and brain with them – all at once.

I felt like a comet hurling through empty space, a heart of stone with a long tail of burning plasma. The words were in the tail, searing themselves onto the pages. I finished the first draft of my second novel in only a few weeks. It is probably the favourite of the three I published, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is steeped in sadness.

Sitting in the garden now, this period feels like a lifetime ago – verleden tijd, as the Dutch would say. I was young then, and my future was still nearly as infinite as my son’s. I’ve not had a true comet moment since. I find myself wondering whether I ought to ceremoniously abolish this sadness, try to make a fresh start, shed some burdensome stages in the pursuit of a more stable orbit. (As I write, NASA’s Artemis II mission is just about to swing round to the far side of the moon, so perhaps space metaphors are on my mind.)

But then I consider that my emotional load, my existential night terrors, are also part of a full life. Would it truly be better to try to paper over those honest cracks? I doubt it. Instead, I should channel my old periodic friend, sadness, into the creative life of the mind: my writing, my art, my music, my scientific theories and future experimental plans. Even if I don’t catch fire this time, a seam of sadness may at least make things more interesting.

In the meantime, I sit in this garden and I watch these birds, and the confetti rains down on me.

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