"Still, whenever I get sad, depressed, stressed, anxious—I say to myself, ‘the tide is just out, and I don’t know how long it will take, but it has to come back in because nothing is permanent.’”
Jewel
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Backstory:
Once, experiencing something distinctly worse than stress or anxiety in that the painful thoughts and emotions seemed unusually permanent, Jewel took a walk. At a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she sat down. “I sat there for about 8 hours,” Jewel said. “I watched the tide go out and then come back. It happened so slowly, so imperceptibly, that I didn’t notice it until, at the end of 8 hours, I was like, ‘Holy smokes, the tide went out a mile and came in a mile.’ And that changed my life. Because I felt so sad, and I felt like my sadness would be forever. But when I watched that tide take all that time to come in and out, it dawned on me that the culmination of nature, of physics, is change. And since I’m part of nature and of physics, it would be impossible for my bad mood not to change. It would be outside of physics for it not to change. It would be arrogant to suppose that I alone existed outside the laws of nature and physics. That realization suddenly changed my whole perception…Still, whenever I get sad, depressed, stressed, anxious—I say to myself, ‘the tide is just out, and I don’t know how long it will take, but it has to come back in because nothing is permanent.’”