Everyday Musings > Thorn Birds

Right now I'm very sad. And as I write this, I feel like I can feel all the sorrow of the world. I don't like being sad. I like musing, thinking, being lost in my own world, but I don't like being sad. And it's not a state I can stay in for too long. Sooner or later I will start to think of the good things I have in life, of how beautiful the world is, of how the sun lights up the one flower blooming near my window. And I'll be happy. And content. But for now, there is sorrow.

I read The Thorn Birds many years ago. The book's title refers to a mythical bird that searches for thorn trees from the day it is hatched. When it finds the perfect thorn, it stabs itself to death singing the most beautiful song ever heard as it dies.

The Thorn Birds could sing so beautifully, that had they lived, and chosen to sing, they would have given much joy. But they choose to live their entire life looking for death.

Many of us are Thorn Birds in our lives. In search of the perfect sorrow - "Nobody loves me", "They don't listen", "Nobody cares", "I'm not important", "No happiness will last in my life". And once we find that, we stab ourselves with it again and again, so that we constantly bleed and never heal, and sing the most beautiful reasons for dying with that sorrow.

Tragedies are all about this. Romeo and Juliet fated to never find happiness, a family cursed like in Othello, a love meant to be unfulfilled like in Little Mermaid. Great for drama and great for plot development. But we do not live in a bound script written by someone else. We write our own. And can pick how it ends and what we'd like to do in it.

There's always a choice. But often, we find ourselves enacting the tragedy in our lives and believing that we have no control over it. 'I'm the kind of person nothing good ever happens to'. And nothing good ever happens. And we were proved right. And we will be, because we wrote the script. If we'd written a different ending, it could have swung that way too, or if it'd hadn't, we could always switch and pick whichever other ending we liked best. Often, we like tragedy best. Because somewhere being sad makes us happy.

An old Zen saying tells us the secret to life - 'Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are tired.' And if we had to keep adding, we could say, 'Smile when you are happy, frown when you are sad'. What it means is that live everything in the moment that it happens. After the moment is gone, let it go. And live in the next moment. Most of us hold on to feelings long after the moment has passed. Either we hold onto our happiness and don't let it go, making us sad eventually. Or we hold onto our sadness and don't let that go, and that makes us happy eventually.

My moment of sorrow has passed. And I can sleep in peace now. So my fellow Thorn Birds, the next time you see a Thorn tree, perch on it and sing your beautiful song. But when the song is over, sing for trees without thorns as well.