Emotion

What is emotion?

Of course, these days if we want to find something, we Google it or look up the definition on Wikipedia. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

In psychology and philosophy, emotion is a subjective, conscious experience characterized primarily by psychophysiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental states.

Okay, but what is emotion?

Is it the hot flash we call anger, the welling in our chest we call love? Is it what we feel, or the label we attach to it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is emotion purely a physical response, or our attendant mental/psychological responses as well?

I read somewhere that (in healthy, well-adjusted people) the physical effects of emotion (increased adrenaline, pulse rate, etc.) last less than a minute. After that, any residual effects are due to our mental response to this initial (physical) emotional ‘wave’ (my term).

What about people who appear emotionless? What is going on when, in circumstances that would have most of us laughing or crying, some people display no outward emotions, nor do they give evidence of the existence of ‘inward’ ones?

These are like questions about God. Emotions are so individual and subjective (as are our relationships with the Divine) that there is no one answer, no size that fits all. Asking questions about emotions is (to no small degree) trying to unscrew the inscrutable, to define the indefinite.

Do these emotions leave a ‘residue,’ some sort of physical, mental, or spiritual after-effects?  What happened to the traces of my broken heart? Are they all merely stored in my hippocampus? How is it that when I recall them, I get an actual neurological, endocrine, and vagal response? How can a memory light up my vagus nerve?

 

 

 

Like those about God, we may never know the answers to these questions. But I do know this:

I feel.

I feel emotions deeply. They rise like waves, carrying me along with them. If I am not mindful, I will lose my balance and plunge into the dangerous seas of uncontrolled emotion, of inappropriate responses to them. I surf the waves of emotion. They pass like waves, strong and sometimes terrible and always undeniably here, now.

All the texts I’ve read on the subject, all the books and studies have brought me no closer to knowledge or understanding about emotion. Sure, I can draw you charts about brain function and can go on an on about current studies and emerging theories, but that is just information and gets us no closer to an intimate understanding of emotion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the tears I’ve cried and love I’ve experienced do get me closer to the subject, to a knowledge of what emotion is.

All the hours of meditation and reflection, of consideration and observation may help me gain wisdom about emotion, but nothing brings us closer to the experience than the experience itself.

Emotion is about feeling. It can’t be approached by or described with words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So why do I even try, why do I write about a subject that defies any written apprehension of it? I don’t know, I am a writer and that is what I do, I guess. Maybe I hope I’ll somehow uncover (or stumble on, most likely) some facsimile of answers, or elicit them in others with my words. Perhaps I seek to give myself a clue by leaving my words as breadcrumbs along the trail of my search. Quite possibly, I hope to gain perspective by observing how my thoughts and words on this subject have varied over time, and with experience.

I don’t know.

Just like questions about God, the only honest answer we can give is…I don’t know. I could not possibly know, for emotions (and God) are in the realm of feeling. One can’t know them, or even know much about them. One can only experience them, down at our cores, in our hearts, where we live…in our guts, in every cell of our bodies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Talking about emotions is like trying to grasp fog, to catch the mist. Sharing emotions is another thing. But can we ever, in truth? If I am full of love for my Beloved (and she for me), how do we know we are even feeling remotely the same thing? We say (and hope) we do, but all those emotions are going on inside, all are intimately and permanently subjective.

Yes, emotions are slippery…and warm…and wet. They are hot and cold, uplifting and crushing. They are too big to be corralled with mere words. They are too vivid to describe. They are…

I don’t know much about emotions, but I do know this…I feel better somehow for having gotten this out of me. I feel better for potentially having shared my thoughts with you. I feel, I feel…

I don’t care if you hear me, am unmoved if you understand me. What I want to know is this…

Do you feel me?

 

Author’s Note: Of course, what I’d like best is to hear what You think on the subject. There are no right or wrong answers.