Let a sad feeling visit. Just don’t hand it a key and a parking spot.

Feelings are built to move through, and fighting one usually keeps it in the room longer than sitting with it would. The difficulty is not the visit, it is the moving in: a day arranged around it, plans cancelled, the story told over and over. Passing through and taking up residence are different events.

When something heavy turns up, let it be there for an evening without explaining it away. Keep one ordinary thing in the day, a meal or a walk or a person. If it stops moving and starts living there, that is the point to tell somebody rather than to manage it alone.