The Tears We Shed

My eye is red and swollen, I think a reaction to sand or salt water after an afternoon learning to surf. As much as I know that rubbing it will only make it hurt the satisfaction and the relief from that action makes the itchiness almost worth it. Every now and then water swells in my eye and a tear or two drop down my cheek and I wonder why do we cry? Why when we are in pain or hurt does our body create a reaction that causes tears to fall from our eyes? It makes sense that when a finger or other pointed object collides with our eyes that tears would result, or in my case today, when something irritates our eyes but I am actually baffled as to what function this crying has to offer our bodies.

I’m trying now to look back on all the times I’ve cried, what did I cry for and when the tears were shed what was the outcome? When I’ve cried as a result of physical pain did those tears aid in the recovery of that pain? Never. When I’ve been hurt emotionally has crying ever resolved that issue? No. When I’ve felt grief or sadness was shedding tears of any relief to my hurt? Not really. So why then do we have this built in feature?

Maybe it isn’t the tears themselves but the act of release that aids us in these tear shedding times. Seeing someone else cry evokes in us this sense of empathy, this sharing of emotion that we have all experienced some time before. We as humans, as much as we deny our oneness, as much as we claim to be independent of all others, reliant only on ourselves and bereft of the humanity that moves around us, we are drawn to each other. We all want to be near other people, we share the need to be loved, to be wanted, to be touched and needed. Us humans are a remarkable species and we as an international community have more in common than we ever pay attention to. We have a universal language that we do not learn in schools or in books or from one another but we are given as a piece of our own selves. A language that comes so naturally that we speak it from the moment we enter this world and that language is our gestures. These symbolic expressions that are always recognisable, that create in all of us a sense of emotion, a sharing of emotion as we each give away our feelings. They say that a smile is contagious and so is a tear. The rawness of its expression, the vulnerability of the one who shows it, the understanding of the emotion that is shared, this is a testament to the power of its generation.

A tear isn’t just an excretion of liquid from the eyes, it is a statement about ourselves at the time each tear is formed and released and maybe that is its only purpose.