Experiencing grief for a day

Not long ago I experienced something which had never happened before and which gave me quite a different insight into one element in particular, the Metal element. I woke one day feeling unutterably sad. Though I racked my brains I could find no reason for this. Nothing was then happening which could be causing me the kind of sense of deep loss I was experiencing, nor could I pin it down to any recent event which might have occurred around this time of the year. I looked at the season I was in, and it was not autumn, Metal’s season, when we might all feel a little melancholic at the imminent death of the year. Nor did the date have any particular resonance for me, as I fretted away at my memory. So where had this overwhelming, all-permeating feeling of sadness come from?

The feeling lasted just that one day. By the evening it was fading, and by the morning it had gone completely, never to this day to re-appear. At one level it puzzles me that I should have been so shot through with such an unfamiliar emotion, one that even in times of deepest distress at some real loss in my life I had so far never experienced. Its very unfamiliarity was disturbing, for it propelled me into unfamiliar emotional territory.. I felt cut off, alienated from my surroundings, and unwilling or unable to share my thoughts with anybody else. I felt as if I was wandering alone like a shadow amongst strangers, unapproachable, as though nobody could reach me beneath this mantle of grief that I was enveloped in, like a garment I could not take off.

The memory of this strange day has faded, but its significance has not, because at some time during it I found myself saying to myself, “so this is what it is like to be Metal. This is what Metal people must be feeling at every moment of their lives.” Was this realization the reason I was asked to experience such an unsettling day? Now I like to think it was, for that journey on to what I like to think is Metal’s territory and my identification, however briefly, with the emotional terrain upon which Metal lives its life, have given me deep, personal insights into this element which I think I could have gained in no other way. These have stayed with me ever since, and guide me with a surer hand to my diagnosis of Metal in other people.