One Emotion, Infinite Shape

Emotions are alarms, signals, markers for memories to indicate long term, short term or immortal trauma. The individual emotion’s affect on your state of mind and mood, is moot. Like the way an alarm clock makes you feel when it goes off at 5 am. Nothing good, and yet, a pure manifestation of good essential pre-planning and discipline. It’s not about how an emotion feels, the feeling is purely to knock you out of your consciousness haze and get your attention, the emotion is an alarm. It isn’t supposed to feel good. In fact, a feel-good alarm most likely would stop garnering your attention at all. Negative emotions are only negative emotions because negativity is harder for the facsimile of your imagination called your personality to ignore. It is annoying to get a phone call at 3am, but when it comes to emotions, we assume the purpose was the annoyance, and we don’t pick up the phone and say hello.

Negative emotions and bad feelings are the greatest accomplishments of humanity.

But a hammer can build a house or crush a dream. Greatness is not confined to goodness, and it can’t be, because if goodness were not a choice, it would cease to exist altogether. Goodness without freedom is obedience. Emotions can be made good the same way the clock that wakes you in the morning might be urging you on to good things for you and your family or just as easily to commit ill against your neighbors. The hero and villain both arise to the same alarm. Both are agitated into wakefulness, there is no other way to be woken up. 

Emotions are not random or extra or insignificant, anything that fits those categories went extinct a long time ago. You experience way too much data in a day to remember, let alone a lifetime. Emotions are like those little sticky tabs you put on the edges of pages in your books, or the highlighter, or I suppose, the strongest of which, trauma, when emotion tattoos its message stained into the scar tissue of your skin, to mark one significant memory against millions. Emotions are an incredible tool or they wouldn’t be here. Period. But if you take the emotion at face value, you’ll smash the alarm clock every time. The very thing screaming to wake you up to remember, angers you so much at having taken you from your sleep, you attack it, vilify it, call it names and even say some emotions are so powerful they are like a disease. This little censor placed lovingly in our guts by all our ancestors who came before, trying as gently as they can to wake us up to live intentional lives outside of a reactionary, consumptive herd.

Explain that to your brain, with its reading glasses on and highlighter in hand, collecting evidence for the great annotated essay it believes it might one day deliver to God, the highlighter runs out so it uses pink instead of yellow for the first time. No problem, because the message of each emotion, happy, sad, and everything in between, is the same: wake up, pay attention, this is important, the brain is going to put this into long term storage when you go to sleep tonight. Why do you sometimes smile when people are upset? Why do we enjoy watching the realistic imitation of suffering? Because the emotions are the same, the roads they travel are the same, they’re alarms, and the body is a silly dog who is color blind and is very likely to dump mislabeled chemicals into this vat, because it knows what we forgot, the actual emotion is far less important than the presence of an emotional reaction altogether.

No one says it, but we all know what I just wrote is true. Happy and sad get crossed all the time, melancholy and joy and loneliness and jealousy, the same clay all twisted into different shapes that don’t matter, only the hands doing the wringing and kneading matter. The environmental and sensory data, whether in reality or in the brain’s infinite imagination, is important. Why is it important? The body has no clue. But is it important? The body is 100% positive, no doubt. 

Everytime you feel an emotion of any kind, think about this, your body has no other way to signal for a memory to be more or less important than any other memory, and we experience so many memories in life, the brain is incapable of storing them all and tending to ensure future access and recall.

Emotions are a filing system mechanism, with lots of emergent properties and symptoms experienced that are actually unrelated to the underlying purpose of the emotions themselves. Is there a way, with examination and reflection, that happiness, sadness, and grief, are all a single emotion, and that the context in which each takes place is so powerful that we have given each its own name, when in truth, they’re all the same.

How does it feel to ask yourself that?