“I think about tears as a doorway: an invitation to be fully human and to connect with others.”

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“When I decided to attend seminary … I told people it was to ‘find myself,’” Benjamin Perry wrote earlier this year. “That frame suggests that I yearned to forge a new identity and discover my future. But in fact, I went because I yearned for a more honest emotional life—and that type of life, I would later realize, is watered by tears.”

Perry had spent years unable to cry, and he sensed that he had lost something important. He embarked on an attempt to weep daily—and when he learned to cry again, he found what was missing:

When I was younger, I thought about tears as a consequence: the emotional sum of previous experiences, evidence of the past cascading down our cheeks. Now, however, I think about tears as a doorway: an invitation to be fully human and to connect with others, in all the complexity that entails.

Today’s newsletter spends some time with our tears—not purely as consequences or inconveniences, but as a core human experience.

On Crying

What I Lost When I Stopped Crying

By Benjamin Perry

When my tears disappeared, so did any possibility of an honest emotional life.

The Not-So-Secret Key to Emotional Balance

By Arthur C. Brooks

Crying can help you keep your feelings in check. It’s also inextricably bound up in spirituality.

Why We Cry on Planes

By Elijah Wolfson

Alone among strangers with little to do, a moment of calm amid the stress of travel

Still Curious?

Other Diversions

P.S.

I’ll leave you with a few more lines from James Parker’s ode to crying babies. If the little ones in your life need a pep talk, I recommend the following:

“Keep it up, little tyrant. You’ve got a lot of power, and no power at all. You’re a tiny fist shaken at the heavens. Soon you’ll be talking, and language will betray you. You’ll say vague, helpless things and make bad jokes. But right now your protest is very direct, very effective.”

— Isabel