Reading my feeds this evening I stumbled upon this which has two interesting parts.
1. The article talks about legally dividing by zero. Which is a bit of a in joke – but see: I told you so.
2. Discusses non-displayed human emotion.
Through out last year, in light of Prue’s departure among other things, I had several conversations about … my lack of emotion … I hate putting it that way but I don’t have anything better. Out of all that has been said and done two comments stick in my mind:
… you would do the same in any other situation …
It’s not that you don’t feel; but you control how you react to the feeling.
From the article:
Quite a few psychologists now think that the rational mind cannot exist without an underlying emotional mind. You have to be committed to being rational. Only then can you override your fervent desire for certain things to be true, and accept that they’re not.
While I wouldn’t go as far as to say: if you can’t override emotional desire you don’t have a rational mind. I would generally say I agree with the proposition. And could cite experiences from over the last 11 months that would lend weight to the argument.
However given the passage of time my grief has run it’s course. Well and truly run it’s course. I now have been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to find some form of emotional passion. I realise that this is not empirical but I can’t come up with anything. Which is not to say I’m dispassionate about everything. I can come up with lots of things I’m passionate about. But they’re all intellectual passion. I also know I have emotional passion … I have been in love; tangoed with lust* and constrained rage.
These things you feel in your heart. I mean literally in your chest. I don’t know how but I do know.
* By lust I mean desire for things to be the way you want them to be.
So what do I think the sum of human emotion is? 42.
Yes just like the Ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Human emotion, when classified, has an equally meaningless answer. But not because the question isn’t a question. Continuing with the HGTG themes: Space is big… if you take everything that happens in the universe of someone’s life and then multiply and factor that out to include everybody’s life. Then the sum of human emotion is incomprehensibly random. It may very well be 42. Or 28372072857287213412120072341234. It doesn’t matter.
The point here is that a persons response to a situation, including how passionate that response is, will always be contingent on the sum of that persons experiences. Life is chaotic (or at least random). We have no control over what tomorrow brings. We get by through pretending our planning or easy going nature will keep the unexpected at bay. We respond instinctively: emotionally, intellectually, dispassionately whatever your experiences have, thus far, trained you to do.
When I felt rage I felt completely out of control because of it. Only for a few seconds and then the sum of my experiences, which have conditioned me to control passion, caught up. I felt out of control because it was new. My experiences hadn’t dealt with it before.
Aside from the tragedy involved, it was exhilarating experiencing something new, a change! Change is often something cited when discussing how people cope. Some are afraid, others are not. I view change optimistically. I think that lets me go into it with my eyes open. So far I’ve been lucky; others though have been burnt and well “once bitten, twice shy” is apt.
I believe that the comments about being non-human come about when our experiences are too narrow. And often will come from people who have vastly different experience to our own. They have no way to “put themselves in our shoes”. When our experience is narrow we always respond the same. No matter what. It is easy to fall into complacency. Life gets comfortable; the road while still unknown can usually be predicted; and we are always involved in the same scenarios. Some may refer to this as being stuck in a rut. I don’t like the negative connotation. It’s no better than implying someone is not human.
If only we could all experience something new everyday …