Charmolypi: Bittersweet Feelings, Mixture of Sadness and Happiness – Greek
Bittersweet moments, transience of life, honoring every experience, and Khalil Gibran
Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Khalil Gibran
The sadness mixed with happiness you feel when you’re leaving your long-time job for a higher career step, or the hard-to-describe feelings on the day your son or daughter left home to go to the university of their dreams.
The moments when you try hard not to laugh while crying. Times when something bad happens for the sake of something good.
There is a special Greek word for such bittersweet feelings: Charmolypi
The legendary movie Life is Beautiful, which I recommended in the Notes & Reads section of last week’s piece, is an excellent example of such charmolypi experiences. While watching the movie, you are quite aware that you are witnessing a terrible story. You find yourself in horror, praying for a good end, but on the other hand, it is impossible not to laugh, smile and be grateful for the goodness of the father character and his devotion to life despite the evil. As a result, the film turns out to be an unforgettable piece for any of its audience.
We have all faced one of those bittersweet experiences at least once. There are dozens of moments continue to exist floating in our subconscious, revealing themselves time to time. Mixed emotions: joy and sadness, pain and happiness, wanting and avoiding. Moments that leave a person inconclusive but leave a trace. Moments that are not clear, that we cannot fit into a mold, but are learned only by experience.
I think the most profoundly affecting bittersweet experiences are the ones that you realize the transience of that unique moment. A diamond to disappear soon forever, extremely painful. A treasured moment that you will remember with love and gratitude even after years, and you who are lucky enough to experience it, and on the other hand, knowing that you will say goodbye to it forever.
Worse than this is to live by avoiding sadness and pain. Missing the love, the love, the uniqueness of connecting to another person and feeling their warmth. I think this is one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. It is always said that a person should live in a way that they will not regret when they die. Here is an approach that I think can bring the biggest regret: avoiding the pain and missing the happy moments.
Another thing about bittersweet moments is to adopt some approaches that can reduce the bitter part of those moments and make the sweet part more intense, perhaps honoring those moments. I'm never talking about avoiding pain. Pain is also part of the bundle of emotions offered to us to live, which I believe we have to experience and honor. But I think it is possible to reduce the burning or at least increase the dose of happiness in bittersweet moments.
In fact, the cure for this lies in Khalil Gibran's verse. Gibran gives us the same advice in the passage from The Prophet which I mentioned at the beginning of my essay, and in his poem On Children, in which he tells his thoughts on how we should approach raising our children and which I never forgot during my motherhood experience while raising my son.
To be aware of the existence of another as a separate individual in any relationship and to respect their own essence and existence.
This acceptance will not only provide us with wonderful relationships but also, in the inevitable moments of separation, can enable us to honor this new situation and the transformation brought about by life.
Notes & Reads:
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain is a book that spends time to identify bittersweet, melancholic outlook on life and its value on our lives. Susan Cain is the author of the phenomenon book, Quiet which made introversion be considered a value and a character trait rather than a flaw. It also changed my self-awareness and self-acceptance as a real introvert.
Next week a Turkish word, from my motherland will be our visitor in the world of words. Thinking on a word from your native language is always difficult, as a surprise. I want to explain it more thoroughly and more delicately so a long work is waiting for me.
Have a nice week and weekend.
— Gulsun
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