This is not a pitiful post. This is not a post about my own unhappiness. This is an analysis of our development as emotional creatures to what we are.
We are born unhappy. A child's first instinct is not one of glee at coming into the world, but rather of stricken fear. The child cannot breathe. This is why the Doctors slap it. The reflex to inhale upon pain is an inherit one. The child breathes it's first breath of air. It's first breath of life.
And cries.
The child cries until it is given the comfort of another being. The father, mother, or nurse. Whatever cradles it lovingly and gives it that necessary comfort. From this moment until the child develops into a toddler. It is an emotionally driven creature.
When it hungers, it doesn't know that it is hungry, it only knows that it is unhappy. So it cries. It is all it knows to do. If a child sees something it likes, it happily makes noise and becomes excited. The entity only knows emotion.
As the development continues, it develops awareness, reason, and logic. By the time it is able to differentiate objects, the essence of being human is developing. We are creatures of reason.
The next 18 or so years of it's life are taken as a journey. We experience pain, ectasy, boredom, jealousy. Everything we can experience we take it in. We reason about it. We try to understand.
That is the core of all humans. We seek understanding. To classify, to name things, to be able to express what we feel as emotionally driven beings into some logical fashion so that we may share it with the world. So that we can shout to the highest heavens our philosophies and triumphs.
But there is a cost.
The more you analyse something, the less 'magical' it becomes. What once was an unknown that was intensely fascinating becomes something you can explain away with a wave of your hand. However, by this point, there are still things which we cannot put into words. For these we resort to our initial emotional state.
When an intense emotion of sadness or unhappiness occurs we do not seek to reason with it at first. We give into our emotions and cry or laugh. Smile or frown. Furrow our brows and hit things if need be, run away and fear for our lives if necessary.
Some humans develop into more emotional people, other people become what those people term 'cold'. I believe I fall into this category. That is not to say that I do not love, that I do not have warmth for my other fellow sentient beings. I am awestruck at humanity beating the odds so to speak.
But I analyse it all, trying not to resort to emotion at all costs.
Does that truly mean I'm so cold?
When you can quantify and tuck away emotions into their own classifications, trivializing them and turning the other cheek to all but the deepest betrayals. I wonder if it's wrong. But if it was, then why could I do it.
The problem I think, is that once you have analysed something and have tucked it away so to speak. You are left with nothing but the emptiness. Possibly a hunger for more knowledge. Unfortunately, it is not always the sad emotions that are researched and tucked away. But the happy ones as well. No emotion is safe from being quantified.
So what do you do when your own nature eats away happiness from you? You resort to other means I suppose. Ways of dulling your consciousness. There is always alcohol, drugs, nicotine highs, hypnosis, and any other way of distraction you can think of. I'd add sex and physical contact to the list, but those activities are not nearly as dulling as one might think in my opinion. An orgasm can only last so long before reality comes back to you and life crushes your spirit again.
As an adult. The human is expected to work, eat, play, and die. As a child one is expected to learn to be an adult. As an infant nothing is expected of you, but the highest hopes are had. And as a fetus or baby? Above all else, love. It seems to me a sad progression.
The trouble I was having with these thoughts tonight, is that once you begin researching (so to speak) the depth of an emotion such as loneliness. It's like an abyss you can't climb out of by yourself. And unfortunately, when all your friends are tired of listening to your shit because you can't stop being fascinated by the cruelty of an unhappy mind, none of them seem to want to help you anymore. As I was thinking about this abyss as I walked home, freezing my face off and deeply wishing I had a car. A girl ran by me, she didn't seem drunk, but after all, it's 3 in the morning on a saturday night on campus. She probably was. Anyway, as she ran by, she smiled at me despite my glum appearance, and wished me a great night.
Random acts of kindess work wonders.
I smiled and wished her one as well, although I doubt she heard it as she whisked past me (falling and slipping into the snow at the bottom of the hill a few moments after she passed me, laughing along the way). It picked me up a little bit. I'm not going to say it brought me out of the low mood I'm in, but it definitely helped.
Is it these small moments of emotion that we live for? When we can revert back from our serious conscious selves into our childish primitive state of pure emotion?
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