There's a familiar refrain from George and Ira Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, "Summertime and the livin' is easy". Leave it to someone, however, to ask if the living is really that much harder in the middle of the winter. Personally, I do think that summertime living is a lot easier, because I am not all that fond of winter and all that the season entails, but I do understand the question.
What are these great seasonal extremes if not opposite sides of the same coin? Much like joy and depression being more closely linked than many people think. Success and failure have a similarly symbiotic relationship.
When you are down, the only place you can go is up. And when you are up...Well, let's worry about that when you are up.
I don't know about you, but I am subject to short periods of sadness and melancholy always followed by a burst of happiness and optimism. I do not know how to attribute either one of those feelings that come over me. Maybe it is just the way that I am wired, but I have come to accept sad times with the rationalization that "this too shall pass". Looking at it from a positive standpoint, sadness has often resulted in some of my most serious and creative moments.
Health specialists often refer to these opposite sides of the emotional spectrum as a mood disorder, but I think that it amounts to a matter of degree and how we learn to control or balance all of our emotions. The reality of either a heads or a tails coming up when we flip the coin of life, has to be realized, accepted and dealt with from a rational perspective.
We should grasp the fact that sadness has the unexplained potential to make us very happy. Strange, isn't it? But we would do well to always remember that.
Without fail, winter turns into summer when the livin' is a lot easier.
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