Expressing our feelings out loud, especially to someone else, can bring a sense of relief. There is power in proclamation.

A disruption of the circadian cycle— the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life— seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day's pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.

Arin, are you all right?How? He managed. How did her arm break?She fell of a ladder.He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold. I imagined something worse, he tried to explain.She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just and accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you.

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself. The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself.

And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life.

The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.

The best thing— in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing— about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

You're insane! she shouted.Pretty cool, huh?No!Tally yelled. Why didn't you tell me it was broken?Shay shrugged. More fun that way?More fun? Her heart beating fast,her vision strangely clear. She was full of anger and relief and...joy.Well, kind of. But you suck!

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?