Are our own dramas far too boring for us to concentrate on for any length of time? Is this why we practice the art of emotional escapism?
Is this why we can’t connect?
Far from it. Our constant contact and interactions, our very souls melding together with each other, through conflict and intimacy, is far too emotionally deafening. When the firey tears well up at the shared suffering of a loved one, we experience it. When our very souls explode with utter exaltation at a joke, at a caress, or even just a moment apart from loneliness, we experience it. When we cry out in pain, in anger, in unbridled joy, in the soulful tremors of living, it hits us like a freight train. Our eyes are opened, and for the briefest of time, the world comes into blinding, shattering focus.
But the selfish emotions… confusion, hopelessness, despair, melancholy, and even the positive, such as success, accomplishment, satisfaction, and even spiritual warmth, we clutch these inside. We make excuses. “This is mine. I deserve this, either because of my failures or gains, and I have gathered it up and placed it here in a warm little box, locked and tucked away from everyone else.”
But this selfishness leads to a stagnant safety-zone. It dulls our mind and spirit. We look at the world through the lenses of these mediocre, yet constant undulations of feeling. We fail to force ourselves into the extreme, and we soon allow ourselves to become an emotional zombie. Our excuse? Closer towards center is common, well-explored territory. The farther from center we venture, the closer we come to losing our emotional momentum, our spiritual cruise control.
We refuse to take the risk of allowing our perfect little unsurprising world of vanilla feelings to crash into pure sorrow, or hatred, or tormentous agony, so we do without the joy, the high, the explosive overabundance of true happiness, and we center ourselves.
And we tell ourselves to play it safe and that mediocrity is simply part of life.
But lives are never tragedy-free, and a blow to the soul causes the same effect we’ve been trying to escape, until we spiral down into the lukewarm comfort of melancholy and sullenness.
We bring new forms of escapism in to lift the spiral and divert the trend: Television, Romance novels, video games, feel-good movies, painting, automobile restoration, blogging, knitting, stamp collecting, or whatever may have some small hope of momentarily reversing the spiral.
But whatever emotional weapons we have at our disposal, whatever momentary lapses from this unceasingly lazy driting towards zombiehood we may experience, the spiral never turns upwards.
It is only when we open up the powder-kegs of unexplored, unfelt feelings, will we finally truly return to center, at least in the long run.
It is only through forcing ourselves into the cascading, roaring waterfall of spiritual ambience that surrounds us, thereby acquainting ourselves to it, can we again be called alive. No longer walking undead, the world comes into frightening focus and we… feel everything.
The sun doesn’t always shine in real life, but when it does, it shines with the brilliance and clarity of a lightning strike, aimed directly at our core.
That’s truly living. It sears. it scorches.
And it feels very, very good.
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