Is sadness stronger than happiness? Is despair more influential than hope? Is pain more powerful than euphoria?

These are not idle musings for me this week as I return from another visit to the assisted living facility that my mother currently calls home. More accurately, she resides there. She doesn't consider the attractive and considerately-run facility home at all. She'd like to be somewhere else, and judging by the sadness and hopelessness hanging in the very air around  her colleagues, so would most of the residents. I pose these questions because I find myself, the human sponge, once again needing to detoxify myself from the flood of negative emotions that threatens to submerge me every time I visit her.  I begin to get my guard up days before I go, and still, I come back every time feeling like a sink hole for the downers of life.

Why do we not get similarly steeped in positive emotions?

I've been attending graduations lately. What a happy, triumphant time. Do I come home floating around for a few days from all the high emotions I took in? No. And most of us love weddings, no doubt because there is no potentially happier occasion in life.  A wedding is the ultimate day for love, supposedly the strongest power that exists. I enjoy weddings, a lot, but I never find myself floating around for days afterwards, on a high from all those loving emotions.

Why is the intensity of these experiences so different? Because positive feelings don't cause us pain. Negative feelings do. And we are pain-avoiding creatures. We are afraid of pain. So we have joy on one hand.  On the other, the duo of fear and pain. 

What really frightens me is how much we change our lives to increase our avoidance of pain as the years go by. As teenagers, we are much more courageous. Anxiety for certain aspects of life often results in an increased alertness or heightened motivation to conquer this challenge, to come out on the other side. Where does this confidence in our ability to weather life go as we age? As I add to my experiences of pain, physical, emotional, and mental, I find myself using a new formula for making decisions—not because I want to do this, but because, overridingly, I don't want to encounter that. I feel my emotional self stiffening, tightening, curling in on myself in protection. Arthritis and osteoporosis of the life force. 

The age old religious question is why would a benevolent God make us suffer? I don't wonder that. Pain of all types has purpose, positive purpose. But I do wonder, why would God make us suffer so?  Why we are designed to so easily let go, move beyond, forget, the euphoria and joy of a happy occasion?  And yet we struggle so—my mother's assisted living facility as case in point—to let go, move beyond, and forget pain and sadness.