muddied waters

I think about my own emotions a lot.  What it is that I'm feeling exactly and why.  I've often found that the closer I look, the less clear it becomes.  Terms like happy or angry, love or fear, never really fit my own experience very well.  I'd easily apply them to others, but that's because it's easy to forget just how complicated other people can be, too.  I can't speak to whether this is about me personally, or me, as a human being.

My mother's often used something my father said to her, as an example of how emotionally abusive he was.  She'd ask if he loved her, and he'd reply that he doesn't understand what love is.  I've been trying to understand my father all my life, too.  I suspect that he was just giving a straight forward answer.  Maybe a little too bluntly because he felt cornered, but some of my emotional skepticism might be hereditary.

On the other hand, I've been of the belief that emotions basically matter more than anything else in life.  Dying wouldn't be so tragic, if it weren't so sad.  Everything that matters comes back to our emotions, in terms of whether or not we think they matter.  For most, the proposition would seem fairly simple- emotions are the natural outcome of events that happen.  Death makes us sad, because it's terrible. 

This is simple, straight-forward, but absurd.  Subjective, arbitrary, opinion treated as self-evidently and objectively factual.  Emotional responses to the same events can vary wildly.  We learn what's terrible and what isn't, we learn what to be emotional about, and we learn it very differently, depending on our lived experiences, and what we've been taught.  Pure reason goes nowhere without emotional weight applied to every variable.

Emotions provide the fertile ground for what we're going to believe matters.  What makes us happy, what makes us angry, sad, anxious.  I'd still argue that this is extremely important, and that we should strive to be a whole lot more mindful about what we feel.  I've certainly found it to be more confusing and misleading than initially thought, and highly impactful on what I actually try to do.  Or in my case, more often why I do so much nothing.

I've never liked the idea of being more callous.  To be less feeling is to lose something that struck me as most important.  I guess I've been rethinking that.  The world sucks.  If I'm going to try living in it, I've got to get better at dealing with that.