On Feelings

There is now a generalized consciousness among most people, I think, that life is short and so it is better to live it up as high as you can, to regret nothing as much as you can help it and, most importantly, as far as this blog post goes, to rid yourself of the things or people around you that do not bring you happiness in consistency and quality.

I hate to lose friends. The thought of losing friends scares me. It is hard to imagine how one could have had so much memory with someone and then, for reasons that are flimsy on most occasions but sometimes cogent, you and that someone just stop correspondence. It often does not matter, or matters very little how profound or beautiful the time you have spent together is, ego just takes over and the relationship ends abruptly.

But the thing I have not failed to notice is that it is absolutely necessary sometimes, for no other reason but for your continued peace of mind. I agree that I could be egocentric on occasions: not in terms of loving myself too much, but in my opinion of myself, quite simply, I think too highly of myself sometimes. It is a problem I know I have, therefore it is something I am actively trying to find a solution to. I think that a lot of us have this problem as well.  We want to feel that we do not need to be a certain way or do a certain thing because it seems too low. But perceiving a certain thing as ‘too low’ is strongly dependent on the person perceiving. Low is different for different people. What is low to you may not be low to me, vice versa. The point is I understand how our ego can take the place of common sense. How we could feel that there is no reason to be the person who fights for the survival of a relationship. It is easy to feel that way. It is also easy to feel that you have gained nothing but heartbreak and chaos from continuous friendship with certain people, a good example is friendship with someone you have feelings for. You could try but if the feeling is truly there, it is nothing but punishment to yourself, the way I see it.

It is not as easy, however, to cut off from someone, but sometimes it is the most rational thing to do. It becomes more important if your peace of mind and heart is at stake. Life is too short to hang on to shards of broken glass and hope that they would be kind enough not to tear your hands. Feelings are not as openly discussed as I think they ought to be. Feelings are essential and they are not just composed of love but of friendship, almost as equally. In the same way, heartbreak is dependent on so many factors and not just on the love of your life breaking up with you. There are so many components to heartbreak that breaking up with someone seems one of the most flimsy of all. Unrequited love, just like unrequited friendship, is such a sad and painful thing. And as such, I can only conclude that it is a sin against oneself to remain in harm’s way. 

I wanted to make this post as simple as possible but it is hard to not include a philosophical angle to it. Angles such as Eric Berne’s, a psychiatrist, who states “Some say that one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner.” It is a mirror of the classic example with which we like to describe anger, a hot coal, the longer you hold on to it, the more it burns deeper and deeper into your palm.

Little Drops of Miracle

It is interesting how we are able to rationalize our emotions and to determine the responses that make the most sense at any given time.

We are lucky to be here even at this moment when it seems as though we can hardly go a full day without hearing of a bombing in Baghdad that killed 250 people or a mass shooting in Orlando that killed 49 people or Donald Trump. There is a difference, I think, between an individual being upset about the bad things happening around or being pained because it is hard to understand how a person would gladly lose his own life and kill two hundred and fifty other people in the process, there is a difference between that and being depressed because ‘the world is an unhappy place.’ Things are really not as bad as they used to be, say, fifty years ago. For example, at least it is now illegal to discriminate against someone because his skin colour is black, women are no longer considered the way they were in the past, a little girl can get all the education she wants today and she can become everything she wants to become; the barriers in front of her are not as huge as they used to be. Technology and the internet have made things too easy. Kids do not just die uselessly as they used to because these days the childhood killer diseases (Tuberculosis, Polio, Measles, Diphtheria, Pertussis) have vaccines which when taken by the child, completely immunizes him or her of that disease. We have found cures for dreadful illnesses and we will find more. World Crude Death Rate has consistently declined since 1950 at 19.1 to 2015 at 8.1.

The world is not an unhappy place. We underrate happiness. We underrate happiness because we have this idea that there is nothing else to be seen therefore the littler things which ought to fascinate us become insignificant. Beauty is an important ingredient for happiness, as such, it should be referenced at every given opportunity. And beauty is not just expressed in humans; in fact, relatively, it is as good as negligible in humans. Albus Dumbledore said: “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the lights.”

The lights are perpetually turned off. We turn them off because we imagine that they serve only to distract us, we turn them off because the things that make up most of the news are the many wrongdoings and wickedness. Nobody reports random acts of kindness.

The moon comes out every morning and goes to sleep every night. We are capable of meeting people each day, different kinds of people, fascinating and crooked in ways only them can be. In our world, you are you and only you just the way the next person can be nobody else but himself or herself. We are capable of making music: sweet sounds that nourish our existence, putting words together and finding sounds to go with them. We are capable of falling in love; of finding someone and deciding that that someone would mean everything to us for the rest of our lives. We are capable of laughing: finding something funny and just laughing; we are capable of making jokes and making fun of each other’s quirkiness and idiosyncrasies. We are capable of poetry and fiction and art and science; of discovering fascinating new things in the world that we are living in; of making up fantastic stories that make us cry and then laugh and feel content and feel anguish and anxiousness and every single feeling possible including those that have not been named.

We are capable of feeling: isn’t the most important thing? Being able to rationalize something in our head and determine what the appropriate emotional reaction or response to that thing should be. Because we have been blessed with this gift of feeling, we are capable of having the right responses to situations.

These things are little drops of miracle that we underrate so much to a point where their beauties and importance have become doubtful to us. Yet these drops of miracle are the ingredients that ought to make our lives and existence here on earth as pleasurable as possibly.