Sadness is universally considered an inevitable illness. Coming undeclared and making its existence a palpable stroke of silent living. Often it takes away everything from you for a while, leaving you utterly blank as if your existence was always a hollowed nest built in nothingness. With constant failures of trying to forget and get out of it, one might get desperately frustrated. It's a never-ending flow, a perennial river. Is it not? The dire need to be free of sorrow, to be neutral, if not to be completely joyous, is a prayer of the heart. But what I have in my mind, as someone who has been through enough cycles of life, is quite an interesting theory.

 One thinks of taking a break, one thinks of breaking through, and one feels the very absence of happiness very closely. And all we ever want to do coincides with a struggle of eternal escape. Perhaps, we have been so invested in looking for a way out of this sad cycle that we could never think about breaking it. Cheating sadness? It sounds rather odd, doesn’t it? But it’s also very possible. Cheating might not be a great word to use, but sadness could indeed be cheated. 

In the sense that, for a while, you could go away from its fingertips without having to struggle desperately. Well, dear reader, let me tell you what to do when you are in a state of sadness. The first principle to remember and that which should be primary is that of a fine distraction. Sadness, quite seriously, forces you to dangle between the stage of reality and that of an impulsive and immediate escapist attitude. But to replace that very dilemma of being inherently stuck, distraction is a sweet mix of both.

 Which is why distraction seems like a more far-fetched idea, to our silent brain that renders it useless. It’s useless, that’s exactly where the essence of it lies. Because, dear sad person, being sad is also quite useless. Sometimes, even a conscious act of distraction becomes a lot to attain, but what I have in mind doesn’t take anything except time. Mind you, when I talk of distraction, I don’t possibly talk of things that surround you. I talk of things you could very well do on your own. Make yourself a warm cup of coffee, or maybe an iced lemon tea in your favourite glass, or whatever is your comfort drink, or you could just call it your consolation drink. Pun intended. 

You are already half distracted in the process of calculating how much of what goes into preparing it. Trust me, the process is a metaphorical hug itself. It lets you choose your comfort even when you are hugely uncomfortable within yourself. A reflection of the power that you have over yourself and trivial control of independence despite a momentary sense of losing it all, and then choose a movie. The act of choosing itself is a process of unconscious distraction. Not just any movie. Choose a thriller or even a documentary. 

You would have thought that my suggestion would be something comical. But thrillers and true documentaries have a lingering aftermath effect. There is a sense of required reality, but also a required escape because it’s not your reality. You invest more time in thinking about it afterwards than you might invest in watching it. The result? You are majorly taken away from your own world of sorrow, to think of things out of your control, and to analyse why the occurrence took place. 

Cheating sadness as it is. Not that hard, right? Then comes the principle of relevance. Relevance is a comfort zone. I bet everyone has a collection of their favourite sad songs. It might be mind-blowing to know that indulging in it is more effective than listening to songs that release dopamine. The subconscious truth of sadness is that the more you try to escape it, the more you fall into it, unlike searching for relevance. Because the problem is not that you are sad, but you are unconsciously convinced that your sadness is solitary. So sad songs? They are the most relevant options. Familiarity breeds relevance, and relevance breeds comfort. You know you are not alone and that when these songs were written and heard, all of the listeners felt the same way. You could start crying, that’s possible. 

But when you do and you stop, the release of energy is everything that needed to be let out. You must have heard about Kidlin’s law. But if you haven’t, it states that “if you write the problem down, then half the matter is solved”. Which is to convey the third principle of cheating sadness, being to understand it. We have hated it for so long that we forget what needs to be addressed as a self-reflective matter. You could distract yourself, and you could relate only to reach the stage of understanding where your sadness originated in the first place. But why did I suggest distraction and relevance if this is the conclusion I was supposed to reach? Because the conclusion is a process of patience, which disappears in the stage of an emotional zig-zag. Which is why it's important to collect a proportion first, to wait before you see. A whole lot of us don’t wait before jumping to conclusions. But who knows? A comfort drink, a thriller movie, and a bunch of sad songs could help.

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