Only Where There Are Cracks Can Emotions Truly Flow

Translated by AI

One day, I was washing dishes in the kitchen, the sound of running water drowning out the dialogue on the TV. Suddenly, a thought floated up in my mind: “After all these years, where has my sadness gone?”

You might say, Sadness is hidden in your body, tucked into the stiff muscles of your shoulders, or soaked into the pillow dampened by tears in the middle of the night. But those aren’t sadness itself — they’re just the fingerprints it left behind.

I thought of Husserl’s phenomenology — the kind of thinking that tries to return everything to pure experience. Emotions aren’t abstract, cold concepts trapped in philosophy books. They’re alive. They are the chill on my skin when I brush my fingers across my cheek. They are the nameless, rootless waves that move through me as I stand on a train platform watching the crowd scatter, gather, and scatter again.

We all think we can tuck emotions away in a drawer, neatly organized like old letters, locked up and controlled. But emotions don’t stay put. They seep, they mold, they crawl out through the cracks, and in your most unguarded moments, a scent, a song, a conversation will pull you right back into them.

A friend of mine — gentle, graceful, always smiling — once suddenly erupted in anger over an innocent question, as if some tiny thing had triggered a civil war inside. Later, he told me he didn’t know why he was so angry, but when he got home, he sat on his sofa and cried for two hours.

And I understood. The emotions we battle inside aren’t silent or sealed away — they are simply waiting. Waiting for an outlet, a crack through which they can slip out, even if it’s in the most absurd way.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty said we are not souls possessing bodies, but bodies experiencing the world. In other words, our emotions are not the product of thought, but the extension of experience: the subtle tightening of skin when the wind brushes against us on the street, the lump in the throat when words falter.

Inner turmoil has never been a rational problem — it’s a kind of bodily blockage. Like rain pooling on the edge of a roof, at first you think it’s nothing, until one day, a single drop comes crashing down, shattering the old wall’s cracks wide open.

So in the end, we must admit: emotions are not something to be “solved.” What they need is not analysis, examination, or explanation — but the willingness to open a door, to speak them, write them, let them move, rather than letting them harden. They need an outlet, like light; they need a direction, like the wind.

Some people turn to music. Some turn to writing. Some run, travel, or practice silence. The method doesn’t matter. What matters is that you cannot let emotions remain stuck in your heart, turning into a silent volcano that eventually collapses in the middle of the night, with no one there to witness it.

I will always remember New Year’s Day in 2020. I was walking down an old street in London. The wind was cold, and my heart felt empty. But in that moment, I strangely felt something — some sadness — “leaving” me. Not because I abandoned it, but because it, on its own, like the wind, left my body and drifted into the gray-blue sky. It said nothing, left nothing behind — only a lightness remained.