Cry!
Photo by Trebbe Johnson
March 10, 2026
A couple of days ago, I was reading an article in The Atlantic about fifty of the 300,000 people who were abruptly informed by the Trump administration that their services were no longer wanted and their job was being terminated.
It was heartbreaking: the woman who fitted people who’d lost an arm or leg with a prosthetic device, the man who remapped shorelines so ships wouldn’t go aground, the woman who went into Haiti after a devastating earthquake and organized medical care, shelter, and food.
Two-thirds of the way into the article, I set down the magazine and just wept.
When I mentioned this response to friends and colleagues, a few told me I was taking things too personally. A couple suggested meditation techniques I ought to try. One or two said I shouldn’t let the world affect me like that.
I ask: What’s wrong with crying?
Over the years, I’ve noticed in the many workshops and wilderness rites of passage programs I’ve led that people almost always apologize if they start to cry. But crying is our natural response to sadness. It’s the union of the heart, unafraid to accept an authentic emotional response, and the body when it takes the heart’s message as verifiable and worthy of outward expression.
When I told people I cried for those whose good work had been so cruelly axed, I didn’t say that it ruined my entire day, that I became incapacitated and fell into depression. I just wept. Then I picked up the magazine again and finished the article.
Maybe those who urge us not to cry, or believe we shouldn’t cry, are afraid that doing so will sink us into a pit so deep and dangerous we’ll never escape. In my book Fierce Consciousness, though, there’s a whole chapter called “Drop into the well of grief” in which I explore how, really, just the opposite tends to happen. Expressing grief actually frees us to be more attentive to all of life.
My wish is that we all cry more, not less when circumstances demand it.
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