When a person is sad, the scenery is never happy.

Reading the book Nothing to do, nowhere to go, by Thich Nhat Hanh, I found this sentence by the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Du: “when a person is sad, the scenery is never happy”. When I wrote poetry, I once thought: “moods change the colors of the world”.

Some people say they see auras, colors over people’s heads that reflect their mental and emotional state, now and over the years. Those who do not see do not believe that there is a possibility of seeing. Anyway, it should be interesting how colors are reflections of thoughts and feelings. In language we say that those who are in love see the world in pink and those who are depressed see everything gray.

What most impressed me over these 8 years (almost 9) of experience as a clinical psychologist is the proof of individual differences.

All objects in the world are objective but they are not the same for all people. The moon, for example, for one person represents passion, for another, madness (did you know that crimes increase when it’s a full moon?) and for another, it’s a celestial body with a certain mass, a satellite of the earth. Although each one thinks that he sees the moon as it is, each one sees the moon according to his own self.

So Nguyen Du is completely right. The most beautiful landscape in the world will be dismal for those who are in a bad way.

When a person is sad, the scenery is never happy.

Even if the scenario is perfect, therefore, the person will still be sad. Moving house, changing relationships, changing jobs, cities, states, countries. None of that helps. The scenery changes. The person continues as he is. It’s like Jung’s famous phrase: “who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakens”.

In a dream, we don’t know that we are dreaming. Except for special and rare cases, such as lucid dreams

But, in general, we don’t know that we are dreaming and we live the dream as a reality. When we wake up, we experience reality in an equal way. We don’t realize that what we see outside is inside. If we are unhappy with life, life will seem bad to us. If we are well, we will enjoy living.

All of this may sound very simple. Those who are of the more logical-rational type (the thinking type in Jung’s classification), might want to see more thought, more concepts, more definitions in what we are talking about. Dividing more, scrutinizing more, analyzing more is just a habit.

From the point of view of emotions, it is enough to divide into pleasant and unpleasant emotions. The thinking person would say: for this, for that and for that other reason, the text is incomplete (ultimately, I didn’t like the text, the text didn’t please me). Thinking also reflects an individual perspective and believing that thinking is exempt from a personal equation, that is, from the subject’s participation in thinking, is naive.

Thus, from the point of view of thinking: “When a person is thinking, the scenario appears to him with what and how he is thinking…

Empathy and understanding

It’s very easy to misunderstand someone. As people are different from each other, it is easy to understand who shares the same colors as our moods or, to put it without metaphors, who agrees with us. Freud said: “When you say: I agree with that, actually, I mean, that do you agree with me🇧🇷

This phrase is another way of saying it’s from the inside out, not the outside in. So not understanding would be something like “This doesn’t agree with me, I don’t agree with this, I don’t agree with you. So I don’t understand you! How can you think like that?”.

And the continuation is everything we know: fights, arguments, arguments, endless conflicts. Each one feeling like the owner of reason.

To have empathy and understanding for the other, you need to imagine yourself in their shoes, get to know their life story in depth, to know what led them there and try to see it from their point of view, from their horizon of perspective, as I said Gadamer. In the words of the great humanist psychologist Carl Rogers:

“Being empathetic is seeing the world through the eyes of another and not seeing our world reflected in their eyes.”

Conclusion

From what we have said we can draw a conclusion: that it is possible to change. It is possible to change the colors of the world, make the scenery more often happy, open yourself to new truths and new perspectives on things, people and shared reality. It is possible to see that thoughts are just pictures and words and that emotions, with their variations in sensations, are transitory and temporary.

A good way to go through everything we talk about here in this text is to do theater. In the theater, we leave the character we believe we are and enter another one. The scenery changes, the people around change, feelings and thoughts change.

Questions, suggestions, comments, please write below!

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