Melancholy
Pleasant anticipation during times of sadness
Written by Çiğdem Gül
Wuppertal, Germany
Our fast moving and superficial world nowadays represents a substantial challenge for the highly sensitive people. In times, when wide range of people´s emotions is treaded negatively by the society, it is not surprising, that melancholy is also repressed, smiled upon or even despised. Melancholy is a luxury, like silence, loneliness and leisure. But for many people is a horror to hold, because it could be possible, that something like melancholy arises.
I think many people don´t know or comprehend why a blue side of happiness should exist in melancholy.
Not everybody feels melancholy. Particularly sensitive people and Highly Sensitive Persons (HSP) feel melancholy, who suffer on imperfection of the world. They feel the suffering of the world and their own suffering much more intense. „The melancholic is located in a melody that wants to dance while he is still suffering,“ said my soulmate. After this conversation with my friend I began to view the topic of melancholy in a new way.
It is not uncommon that the melancholy is equated with depression. Admittedly melancholy can degenerate into depression, if the person concerned, medium and long term, loses control of his melancholy side. An excess of melancholy can lead you mental illness.
„Healthy“ melancholiacs are very longing people. It does not concern the conventional longing, based on the lack of material things such as status, money, power etc.. For those, who had seen the light before it is the higher longing for something else. It is the longing for a special moment and / or for a special place. That’s the goal. The melancholic is inwardly on his way to achieve this goal. Melancholy is thus the joy that is not yet lived out; therefore it is the pleasant anticipation. In this sense the person feels in his melancholy his anticipation, to reach the goal soon via the inner path of sadness. Only then, he would feel the joy. Melancholy is for me the caterpillar in the cocoon, which is looking forward to soon become a butterfly… and fly.
I feel completely in my being and in my soul only through the involvement and bye living my melancholy. That was not always the case in the past. Too much I despised it. Today I love being in melancholy. I would never again want to feel only joy or only sorrow in life; because they actually belong together forever and should not be felt. Excluding the one or the other existing feeling would not be healthy. Therefore, I allow myself to feel both joy and sorrow, and all other feelings associated side by side or one after the other as an overall emotion. My melancholy does not mean therefore to experience the sadness as a crash. No, my melancholy carefully and protectively carries my sadness. And the sadness is not always a bad feeling, like our society and the media suggest. The sadness when only melancholy is behind it, is just a way to get up again, so over it the goal of joy can be achieved by it. The beautiful flower of melancholy thrives and grows in sensitive people to the full glory of a red rose.
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Pictures: © Courtesy of Giovanna Aryafara (Bali, Indonesia)
My dear friend Giovanna,
you have such a beautiful heart and soul!
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting our network’s vision and mission with your breathtaking photographs.
Sending hugs and best wishes,
Çiğdem
About Giovanna Aryafara
Giovanna Aryafara is an Australian photographer living in Indonesia. „Her works offer access to the beauty of our Earth, inspired by her love of sharing the diversity of human experience. Giovanna Aryafara started her life-long passion for photography 40 years ago in Sydney, Australia, continued in New Zealand as a school Photographer for several years. Over the years, she has exhibited her works in Australia, Bali, Brazil, and Thailand. She exhibited at the Africa Photo Festival 2018 in New York, Atlas of Humanity in Paris and Italy in 2019, and also Atlas of Humanity in Paris and Milan in 2022. Giovanna won the 2020 Africa in Focus Photo Competition for the „People / Cultures & Communities of Africa“ category.
Giovanna travels to India and Ethiopia yearly, both for her business and Photography. Her love for Photography, Art, fabrics, and tribal crafts come together at her highly regarded Home-wares and Lifestyle Stores ‘Bungalow Living Bali’. She also has a Photography Gallery and coffee house in Bali. Her work is on Exhibit throughout her two retail Stores and Gallery.“
For more information about Giovanna Aryafara:
Website: https://giovannaphotography.com
Instagram: @giovannaphotography
Facebook: Giovanna Photography
About Çiğdem Gül
Çiğdem Gül is the founder of the „Intercultural Network For The Highly Gifted“ (INHG). She is a Turkish woman of Turkmen origin with Persian roots and migrant in Germany, graduate Economist at the University of Wuppertal, Employment Agent and Journalist for the language combination German, Turkish and English.
For more information about Çiğdem Gül:
Çiğdem Gül: About Çiğdem Gül
Instagram: @cigdem.guel
LinkedIn: Çiğdem Gül
