I borrowed a short zine book from Kristin to read on the train the other week. Called “The Art of Crying”, it’s a series of observations around the role and effect of tears. (It’s written by the brilliantly-named Pepita Sandwich).
The observation I’ve thought about most since is this: while kids often cry because of physical pain, injury-related emotional tears decrease as we become adults.
On one level, this is obvious. As children, pain feels overwhelming and all-consuming. A child’s tears very effectively communicates their need for care and protection from an adult, and this helps their survival.
As we get older, we learn to categorise injuries, predict their duration, and contextualise them within our broader experience. (A scraped knee at thirty doesn’t carry the same existential weight it did at three – thank goodness!)
The resilience and self-reliance we gain along the way is a help to us. But I think there’s also a loss too. Children’s tears over physical pain represent a kind of radical honesty about the experience of being embodied and fragile. As adults, we don’t have that same immediate, unfiltered connection to our own vulnerability.
Pepita did not say anything about whether adults cry more over other things, but I’d imagine it to be true. I expect as adults we cry more about our emotional wounds – heartbreak, loss, fears. Perhaps we simply redistribute our emotional responses toward the more complex pains that come with deeper self-awareness.
I wonder if this makes our relationship with suffering becomes more sophisticated but also more isolated. Where a child’s tears invite comfort and connection, adult pain often becomes a more private experience, managed internally rather than shared openly.
I don’t think it needs to be this way. Our pain and tears can move us towards recognising what most important to us. They can prompt us to collectively attend to that pain.
At a weekend away in June someone shared the idea of “encouraging the good, wherever you find it”. It was intended in a different way to how it has come to mind here. But I have just thought of the goodness that exists in our very human expression of tears.
Tears might be something we want to avoid and move past, but they serve an important purpose. Tears can be both an act of resistance and of tenderness. They are a sign of our being moved, and of the fact that we can be moved.
Maybe the art of crying, then, isn’t about trying to return to that childhood immediacy, but about choosing and allowing ourselves to be moved in the right moments. Our capacity for tears – whether over a scraped knee or a broken heart – connects us to something essential about being human. When we allow ourselves to cry, and when we witness others’ tears without trying to fix or rush past them, we practice a good thing: tenderness in a world that often demands we keep moving.
thejoyofrachel 