What do Tears Carry?

As a man, the opportunities available to us to cry, progressively decrease. A part of adulting as a man is to forgo emotion, to be detached. To avail the cry ticket, there are but a few opportunities: Your parents' death. Wedding. Childbirth. That 3AM night. To cry is to put yourself out there, to reveal yourself in what, one might argue, is the most vulnerable position. Yet, each tear holds something. A beckon to something, a release of a held emotion, an opportunity to embrace that vulnerability, well, because you're human. I tend now not to cry too much, surprisingly. Yet, it's always when I'm alone, in solitude, that I break down. And the cue is always the same. A devotional song, a bhajan, dedicated to the Lord, always plays. I find myself captivated in a mixture of nostalgia, melancholoy and intense devotion. Then, I do the fateful sin of opening the lyrics and their English meaning. And boy, do the waterworks begin. It started this time, as I read the Venkateshwara Suprabhatam…