tears

When I was a young boy, I had a an Aunt who had quarreled some years before with a brother she had love very much.  At the height of the quarrel, he had written his angry letter saying he would never see her again.  And indeed he never did.  My Aunt kept the letter, and each Saturday afternoon, for the rest of her life, she would go into her garden, reread the letter, and cry.

                A brilliant college professor told me recently that he has a secret “vice.”  Whenever the pressure of his work becomes severe or the frustration of his personal life begin to mount, he puts everything aside and goes to the movie houses.

                “I try to find a particularly sentimental film,”  he says, “and I sit in the back row in a corner, where I’m more or less alone.  Then I wait for the maudlin scenes and bawl like a baby.”

                The young mother of three small and rambunctious sons has the same vice.  When the youngster have been particularly trying or the budget simply can’t be stretched to pay another new clothes, or the washer breaks at the middle of the laundry day, she sends her boy to their grandmother’s house for the afternoon, turn on the record player, and weeps.

                “Then I turn off the record player, put a cold towel on my eyes for a few minutes, and I’m fit to face the world again.”

                The chance are that your first reaction to these small episodes is one of disapproval.  Why should a woman make a point of morbidly reviving grief over and over again?  What a weak man professor must be if he can sit weeping over the maudlin scene of a second rate film!  Doesn’t a young wife have anything better to do than drown herself in self-pity?  But if you’ll think about it for a minute, and you’ll realize that these people had found a harmless, effective, and controllable way of getting rid of feelings that might otherwise have been emotionally or even physically damaging.

                Tears are a natural and universal release for many minor emotions.  They siphon off the small frustration that confront all of us every hour of every day.  They are a way of protesting the things we can’t do anything about.

                But natural and universal as the function of weeping is, society has surrounded it with an extraordinary number of taboos and restrictions vary from one nationality to another, but they are generally the most stringent among the Americans, the British, and the Prussians.

                In theory, among these peoples, men are never supposed to cry except in bereavement.

                Women are allowed just a little more latitude and are permitted to weep on public on such sentimental occasions as weddings and privately at disappointments in their love relationships.  But is considered poor taste for them to exceed these prescribed limits.

                Italian men, women, and children weep unashamedly on almost any sentimental or touching occasions.

                Russians and Polish soldiers traditionally cry when they drink.

                In most countries, both men and women weep in church, and at concerts, and only among Anglo-Saxons are a child’s tears, for whatever reasons, considered a breach of etiquette.

                Why should we cry?  Because it depressurizes us emotionally, and thus relieves stresses that may affect even our bodies.  Of course there is a difference between people who merely restrain their fears most of the time and those who have disciplined themselves unable to cry.  And among the latter, there is evidence that certain physical diseases are aggravated by inability to find release in tears.

                Coronary disorders often occur in people who are unable to find release in tears and if the victims can be induced to cry, an improvement is often shown in the heart condition.

                Any student of psychoanalysis—and, indeed, anyone who has been a patient in this kind of treatment—knows the important role that tears play in therapy.  Everyone cries in analysis, and everyone experiences a feeling of almost euphoric relief in tears, as though the weight had been lifted on constricting band loosened.

                Contrary to what many believe, tears are not necessarily the mark of deep emotions, but are more often the relief of an accumulation of feelings relatively close to the surface.  We cry in frustration, in irritation, in fatigue, in sentimentality—all superficial but universal feelings that must and should find some recurrent release.  And obviously tears in themselves are neither a solution any emotional problem nor a cure for any physical disease.

                But civilized living requires that on many occasions we exercise strong controls or ourselves.  We are expected to deal with out children and our neighbors and our business associates with a show of calm assurance.  We are required to meet crisis and catastrophe without breaking down.  But rigid control maintained through all your waking hours is itself unnecessary, exhausting, and sometimes damaging.  And it is important to our happiness at the times when there is not a challenge to be met or a contest to be won.

                The college professor and the young mother have learned this lesson, and so, I think, had my Aunt.  None of them was crying about the situation at hand.  Obviously, the highly intelligent educator was not truly moved by the mawkish scenes on the screen; nor was the woman weeping to the strain of a song actually crying to the music.  I do not even believe that, as the years passed, my Aunt’s tears any longer had much relation to her brother and their almost forgotten quarrel.  Instead, each of the three had found a device for precipitating tears, a device that they themselves could regulate and that enabled them to decontrol their feelings at a time and place where crying could be expected to pass unnoticed or, if not, where the release of their motions could not possibly be harmful to anyone.

                The Bible says there is “a time to weep,” and it seems to me that if we choose our time carefully—perhaps in church, perhaps at the movie houses, perhaps in the privacy of our bedroom or garden, wherever our tears will not hurt or embarrass others—we can use this natural safety valve to dissolve away many of our tensions.