Beauty in the Breakdown
Updated: Dec 15, 2020
July 25th -Why do I do this? Leaving pieces to rot in limbo for way too long? Or in this case since July 9th... what is that.. two weeks. Seems like a lifetime ago, but I'll accept it.
July 9, 2018
There are many things that i want to say right now. And I am afraid that if I'm too short, I'll forget what I was getting at later on, but also don't want to get too stuck on any part in particular.
Somehow I tied nature vs nurture into this, maybe empathy. How the mind makes connections. I’m already forgetting some of it. Anyways….
“What if the energy from any one moment ripples outwards in a circle, not only charging a person after the event but in the minutes before as well. The more energy drawn from the moment, the larger the ripple produced and the further it is felt from the epicenter.”
What if we can feel the effect of things before they happen, but we are blind to it until the event occurs?
Would it matter anyways?
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July 25th - I'm not sure why I led with this. That intro might be the opposite of what I am trying to say. I think, I was accidentally focusing on another curiosity. (that until feelings are matched with surroundings and circumstances, they are often too vague to define.) But that story can hopefully wait for another day...
I guess, just imagine that you can feel something before the event itself.
I've had many conversations lately about empathy.
How we can share the same feelings while living completely opposite lives.
Relating to a person's emotions while never having experienced their situation.
Or not being able to relate to someone who has gone through the same occurrence.
Someone who was made fun of as a child because they were fat versus someone who was made fun of because they were poor. While there are many differences between weight and money, both people became aware of the pain of being labeled for more than who they are. They both understand this feeling well.
We tie these emotions to events, but they can be felt again later in life... about something completely different. Being universal and independent of any specific situation.
I wrote a piece on nature vs nurture that i will probably never publish.
But I will touch on it as it seems to fit.
Brief summary:
Nature is who you were.
Nurture is who you have become.
Nature is at the root of your being, ingrained from the start.
Nurture is external. The spread of tools that you have the ability to work with, The surroundings in the world which you are able to perceive, The situations and encounters you will be able to draw meaning from.
Yet no matter what we learn, what we do, what path we take... the things that shape us come from our nature.
Which tools we select from the options available. Which moments we learn from. What we take to heart.… that is our nature.
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[So after writing this, I realized that I completely didn't even consider nature in terms of genetics. More just who we were before the world started to influence us. Because I was at this from a philosophical stand point, never caring about the debate itself, only using it as a template. And then realized that I have no idea how to isolate any of this and I have no idea what I am talking about.
Actually, I might have just been trying to down play the role of nurture in hopes of finding some underlying constant. Like it doesn't matter how you came to understand the things, but that they were understood. That although situations are specific, emotions are universal.
...Or was I trying to justify ignorance that resulted from nurture, with the defense that its only surface waves?]
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July 25th - .... No words. Absolutely impossible to isolate. But I appreciate my naive and valiant efforts. But no. Not touching that one with an any length of a measuring instrument.
However...
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-07-visual-semantic-neural-network-human.html
...do kind of want to touch on that at some point. )
I know people who live based on gut instinct. People who see a whole chain of events from a single moment and now, suddenly, all is lost although barely anything has happened. People who wake up in dread and just know that something bad is about to happen. It doesn't matter whether or not the issue is actually occurring, the feeling they have is still very real.
And when they are right about something? Is it a self fulfilling prophecy? Or did that feeling, that gut instinct, need an outlet?
Could it be that the person just needed some reasoning behind why they were feeling that way before it could dissipate?
What if we feel something first and then we try to justify the feeling to ourselves using our current situation.
"I'm sad, I must feel this way because of x,y, and z going on"
What if the emotions were going to happen no matter what?
But then we had to assign something concrete to explain it, so that we could start to get that feeling out of our system.
Where am I going with this?
Well, I think my original question that started me thinking was
‘How can I make this feeling beautiful to me?’
I was sitting in a friends room totally okay, and then I just wasn't. As far as I am aware, nothing changed. But it was sad and it was sinking and kind of frustrating and empty. And I couldn't really do anything about it because there wasn't any situation that occurred to work through or learn from.
So while i was sitting there on the floor, I kind of threw away my usual way of wondering what may have caused it and decided instead to ask-
“If I am going to feel this way right now, regardless of the circumstances or surroundings, how can I make it beautiful? How can I capture the rawness of it? Appreciate it for what it is? How can I conquer it, by moving through it. Is it possible to turn it around?
How do I make something wonderful from this despondency?"
Anyways, This is just a thought jumble. I’m not going for cohesion, Just tying to find meaning in melancholia. Or something. drenched in Garden State-esque undertones.
Maybe it's something like: We are capable of tying our emotions to our surroundings at any given moment. But we can feel the same emotions at other times in our life despite completely different events. Maybe we assign an observed situation to how we feel, instead of assigning a feeling to an active situation. And maybe I can take this feeling and assign something positive to it. Snap out of it by working through it that way.
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July 25th - I cut out so much in the middle that I'm pretty sure much of the coherency that I am mentally tying could very well be lost on someone that's not in my head.
What I was trying to get at- is the possibility that our emotions may precede the events. That events in themselves do not create any certain type of emotion. It is the weight that we give to the event. It is how we are affected. It is the why that it is impacting us. It is the ties to the situation itself.
And although the occurrence can at times be instant and unanticipated, much of the time we shine the light of our current mindset on it. I was just how it looked in the light.
I noted once that if I go into a work shift thinking that its going to suck... that its probably going to suck. But if I amp myself up about it. Like, 'only a few hours, you've got this, it'll be awesome'... it ends up being just that.
So maybe we need something to blame. Maybe we feel dread, have this feeling that something is wrong... and until we have a 'reason' for that feeling, we cannot let it go. Bringing about this 'I knew it was going to happen' resolution.
And maybe I am glad that I sat on this for a while.
Though I realize it is doing me no justice in the timeline of things, having coherent thoughts that are not based on current emotions is kind of important.
... As I may have just explained.
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