Pyro (controlledburn) wrote in genome_project, @ 2010-04-26 20:54:00 |
|
|||
Current mood: | thoughtful |
Entry tags: | april 2010 |
Who: Sam and Mrs Walker
What: Homework
When: After school one day
Rating: PG-13 (Sam likes swearing)
Emotions are what you expect them to be: unpredictable, always changing, never still. They dictate moods, swing opinion, alter perception and rule the heart and sometimes the head. Ever present, completely indescribable and exceptionally difficult to pinpoint.
The real question is why?
What purpose does emotion serve?
Emotions are associated with a mood, certain temperaments, specific personalities and they can either inspire or completely negate any and all enthusiasm you have for life. In truth, emotion means a state of mind, a place you are, somewhere you can’t be reached. Your emotion is yours and yours alone and as unique as every single emotion is they can be affected, manipulated, brought to their best and their worst.
Some control their emotions better than others, which in my opinion is completely subjective to their upbringing and fear of breaking the strict moral code humanity enforces on itself. To yell is rude, to scream is childish, to cry is weak, to need is desperate and confusion only causes frustration and misunderstanding.
I have no such fear, emotion is the one true thing in this world. Words are easy, actions can mislead, but emotions never lie. They’re a true reflection of what it is you’re feeling at a precise moment in time however fleeting that moment might be. It’s true, real, without guise.
Honesty hurts and sometimes the most honest things are said in the heat of the moment, without thinking, acting on impulse and impulse alone. Nothing else, just you and the emotion.
A lot of people can’t handle that.
The James-Lange theory is that the human body responds automatically to external stimuli, creating tension, causing a heart to beat that little bit more, causes cold or hot sweats and the uncomfortable dry sensation in your mouth and the back of your throat. James-Lange theorise that emotions come about as a result of the previously mentioned physiological changes.
Are we in fact at the mercy of our bodies?
It’s a cold hard fact that we have hearts that beat, minds that think, fingers that move and an interlinking nervous system that assists us in navigating this world that on a daily basis throws changes at us that only we as people can successfully deal with.
I disagree with the idea that all emotion is simply a bi-product of the changes in the world around us. More often than not emotion? Makes no sense, bears no relevance to the events happening around us, takes you in a direction you’d rather not go and leaves you more vulnerable than you would be if you were simply reacting to a physiological change. It’s cold, clinical, and the world is anything but that, unless of course you live in a pretty fucked up place.
Our humanity is what makes us unpredictable, our inability to control ourselves, to censor and control. Try as we might, nobody can censor everything, something slips through, the small niggling sensation in the back of your mind that tells you that you’re just lying to yourself by pretending everything is okay.
Every emotion is instant, suffocating, overwhelming and completely out of your control. Control is an illusion, a make believe vice that people apply to areas of their life that make no sense, it’s there to keep a lid on those emotions nobody wants to admit to.
Who wants to admit to being angry? Jealous? Insecure? Nobody.
Using the argument that emotion is our bodies reacting to outside influence might be easy to prove through tests, but applying that same logic to a person completely swept away by a tidal wave of emotion just doesn’t work. Sorry, scientists, whoever the fuck you are, it just doesn’t work. There is no way anybody on this planet can control every emotion, not when they’re so unpredictable and surprisingly fierce.
Straight boy falls for the not so straight boy, golden girl goes bad, sweet boy turns nasty, how do you explain away these sudden dramatic shift in characters? They don’t just happen because our bodies decide they’re too hot, don’t have enough air or we have an itch that we just can't scratch.
There’s something deeper to emotion, something that can’t be described or understood. To understand is to rationalise and there’s nothing rational about emotions, especially when you’re screaming at the top of your lungs or hitting something hard and impractical.
Pain isn’t rational, far from it, and yet we can’t stop ourselves from hurting or getting hurt. How we feel, when we feel, who we feel something for is completely out of control. We can tell our mind to behave, to think through it, but we can’t stop our heart from doing something completely different.
We fall for people we shouldn’t, we care about those that don’t care about us, we make choices based on nothing but the emotions we’re feeling at the time and more often than not some of the best and worst decisions are made on impulse alone.
The word rational doesn’t belong in the same sentence as emotion, it’s an oxymoron. The two don’t fit, like uneven sides of a jigsaw puzzle that don’t come together to make a clear picture, they can’t and won’t make a complete image. Saying your emotion is rational is like saying cheese and chocolate go really well together.
Of course some emotions are stronger than others and those tend to be the angrier hateful ones, the ones that blindside you. Those are the easiest to tap into, easier because they’re so powerful, they make you think that’s all you want to be, the only way to be, but who knows their true nature? Nobody ever lets anybody get close enough when they’re in the sway of those sorts of emotions, it’s easier to push people away than to open your arms and embrace them.
And then there’s the emotion commonly referred to love and this one right here is the one I have the most issue with because love? Is a farce. I think people use it as convenient crutch for depending on another person to the point where you forget who you are and what you were before getting involved. And then those who use the word “love” to excuse all sorts of crazy behaviour, taking no responsibility for their own issues and how they deal with the subsequent emotions that rush through them when their boyfriend or girlfriend are being hit on or flirted with.
Emotion is real, love? Not so much.
They say that when somebody dies they lose twenty one grams in weight and so far nobody can explain why. Sure there are theories, but none of them are solid, none of them account for it, and not one word makes any sense. Some people like to think the weight belongs to our soul, but again, I can’t really theorise on this as I have no solid proof. Then again emotions can’t really be proved or disproved either so who knows? Maybe we do have a soul and maybe it goes somewhere after we die. I sure as hell don’t know and I don’t think I care enough to find out, guess that’s just something I’ll have to find out when I eventually leave this mortal coil such as it is.
In conclusion:
Emotions are more trouble than they’re worth, but life wouldn’t be quite as interesting if we didn’t feel them, didn’t express them, didn’t get into trouble because of them and didn’t need them to prove that there’s more to us than simple flesh and blood.
They’re a necessary evil, like most things in this world.