Contraction offers insight and renewal; embrace it to live fully.

Melancholy teaches us about life's rhythms beyond happiness mandates.

Understanding suffering can enhance, not dim, our life experience.

It may not be an exaggeration to suggest that our culture worships expansion, which we can define as “an increase in size.” We appear to love anything that gets bigger: our vehicles, bank accounts, online presence, property, a reputation, whatever we can acquire, and how many hours we can devote to work. We may be so mesmerized by our fascination with expansion that we may not notice what is sacrificed. It may be that our tendency to reject contraction automatically aggrandizes expansion.

Disparaging Contraction

We appear to want a life that is simply a series of expansions, in the form of successes, celebrations, fun, wins, pleasant surprises, and the acquisition of new understanding or skills. On the other hand, contraction suggests a decline in activity, a slowing down, and pulling in. A contraction often happens when we experience grief, failure, fear, defeat, feeling lost, and fatigue. There are at least two reasons for our distaste for contraction. The first is our denial of death. Death may be the ultimate expression of a contraction, with sadness, loss of energy, and interests being reminders of death. The second is our obsession with happiness, which defines unhappiness as simply inappropriate.........

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