Alive!

As I wrote the path for this piece, I thought of the shortcut word that’s often used in software developer for an exclamation point - bang.

Alive bang

In a recent conversation with a friend she offered the idea that what seemed vitally key to me was being and feeling alive. As she spoke I knew exactly what she was expressing about me. So let me explain …

It starts with the emotion or idea of happy or being happy. I read so many books and quotes that talk about the goal of life is to be happy. I hear so many people describe something similar, that they want to be happy. Now I don’t want to be unhappy or miserable or anything similar for long period of time, but I can’t remember ever saying that being happy was important to me. It’s not that I didn’t want to enjoy myself or experience happiness, but that has rarely been a goal. I don’t mean to say that happiness is not a worthy ideal or goal, but for me it’s not my thing.

Without the goal of being happy, I wasn’t entirely certain was I was seeking or hoping for, but it different from happiness, not more or less, just different. And still it’s been these even if I didn’t have words to express it. Alive is part of that. So is autotelic. And so is joy.

With joy I make a distinction from happiness. Happiness to me, as I’ve seen it is an experience or emotion that often arises because of something external. Perhaps it’s a person or an experience. Because of the external nature, often it can be fleeting; it comes and goes. It’s unlikely we will retain happiness with that kind of input, especially when so many other things happen in our life where we feel so many other things – pain, sadness, grief, ecstasy, anxiety, love. Most of these come and go as well.

But joy … in my experience of joy, joy is internal and spontaneous. It happens just because, for no specific reason. It bubbles up from nowhere and can last awhile or only a moment. For me it’s a delightful, energetic state of being that just happens – sometimes with a giggly kind of smile. I’ve also experience this kind of joy even in the midst of grief or frustration – it’s mixed in. It has an entirely different texture and quality from happy, one that satisfies and lights my body and soul in a more profound, deeper sense.

I’ve written about autotelic before - http://fiercewolfspeaks.blogspot.com/2012/03/autotelic.html. It’s about the idea of enjoying every as it is and the act of doing something is simply its own reward. For me that’s frequently the case. Of course I gravitate towards those things I tend to enjoy more, and still I enjoy what most would consider mundane such as washing dishes.

The idea of being alive or feeling alive encompasses so much for me. Joy is an aspect of it. Autotelic connects even deeper because it’s so prevalent. Alive goes even further – it’s about experiencing life fully, being in life completely as often as possible. Feeling each emotion as it happens. Appreciating sensations whether it’s smell, touch, taste, hearing, or seeing – or even intuition or other sense. It’s letting each moment be rich and simple and whole in itself. The moment might be a reflection on the past, or a hope for the future, a loving caress, or a new understanding of how to solve a problem at work, or a passionate kiss, or a keen insight into how two things relate, or how the keyboard feels as I type this. It doesn’t matter what it is – but being in life, of life, part of life – that’s thrilling beyond any happiness I can imagine or have experienced.

That’s life. That’s being and feeling alive. With a big bang!

Emotions as Exquisite Music

In my last post I wrote about feelings. I wrote both about coming to be able to knowing what we’re feeling and understanding that more than likely we are often feeling more than one thing at once.

Here I’m going to use an extended analogy of emotions and music. In particular I’m going to use the image of a piano with 88 keys, with a sustain pedal and a mute pedal. On a piano, a musician can play one note at a time, or many notes all at the same time. The pianist can use the sustain pedal to let a note sing out for an extended period of time slowly fading away, or use the practice pedal to mute and cut short a note.  The artist can hit a key with soft tenderness, or a sharp staccato, or a great emanating sound – they are endless ways to hit a key on a piano.

Music also has chords and keys. Keys represent a series of notes that correspond to a particular pattern of sounds, and chords of ways of using they sounds together. Some chords like 1,3,5,8 are quite in harmony, others like a second or fourth can sound dissonant. And then there is a piece of music which takes into account all of this – the key, the chords, ways of playing notes, using the pedals, and invoking a style or genre of music.

Now imagine emotions as a note on a piano. Each emotion can be played or felt with different textures, intensities, durations, and so on, just like a note on a piano. Emotions can be in harmonious chords that go together  - joy, happiness, and satisfaction. Or emotions can be felt in unusual combinations, like bittersweet.

Our lives are like a symphony of emotions played across our body. They come and go, felt and then released and fading away for the next emotion to come in.

What symphony, or rock band, or rhythm of music and emotions is playing in your body?

To extend this a little further from the last post, for those that are new to music, they go through ear training. They learn how to recognize any given note on a piano. They play a note and then say what note it is, or they play a particular note to learn it and recognize it. This is just like learning emotions – asking what emotion is there and discerning what’s being felt.

Then musicians go through additional training to learn and recognize chords and different intervals of notes – thirds, fourths, fifths, and so on. This can be like learning and recognizing combinations of emotions.

Then musicians learn how to play. Starting with simple pieces with single notes one at a time with few chords, learning how to add texture and pedals and loudness or softness. It takes practice to train the hands and arms to be sensitive to a keyboard and an instrument. It’s the same with emotions as we learn how to feel textures and differences, for example a giddy happy versus a satiated happy. Or a boiling rage versus a simmering anger.

Just like it’s time a musician time to learn how to play an instrument, it can take time to learn our emotions. When you learn, it’s a joy to hear what we play and how we play.

What am I feeling?

For many the question of ‘what am I feeling?’ is full of uncertainty and often a blank expression. Discovering a feeling or emotion can be challenging if we’ve hidden out so long that we aren’t even sure anymore. At one point, for me it wasn’t all that easy for me to answer that question as well. Over time through listening and being patient that has changed.

At first the experience for me was like going through a checklist. Do I feel happy? Do I feel angry? Do I feel sad? Am I frustrated? Am I lonely? Even a checklist was difficult because in some cases I wasn’t even sure what the feeling actually felt like. I even changed the questions to be more like does this feel like loneliness, or does this feel like frustration? It was also difficult because it was usually someone else asking the question and normally a response is expected fairly quickly. Since I didn’t know and I was using a checklist it could be 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds before I’m come to an answer. Fortunately most people were quite patient with me while I went through this process.

Identifying a single emotion or feeling within a few seconds became a major achievement. The checklist went quicker or I would use a shorter checklist of a category or grouping of feeling starting from a vague idea of what I might be feeling. Still it wasn’t automatic process.

Over time it did become smooth and easy. Over time I would ask myself the question in my head just as practice. Over time I knew what different feelings felt like. Over time I could identify more feelings and more textures of feelings as well.

Then I came to a confusing point where when someone would ask me what I was feeling, multiple feelings came up all at once and I didn’t know what to answer again. For a while it felt like I had gone backwards and suddenly I was back to taking 10 seconds to answer ‘what am I feeling?’ The confusion came because the normal expected answer is one feeling. I realized that I was going through the list and putting numbers to each feeling to find the most dominant one and assuming one feeling was what was wanted. It took a while to put this all together and understand what was happening. Truly I was feeling many things at once and that the answer to ‘what am I feeling’ could really have multiple answers.

Multiple feelings at once may seem like an unusual idea, but I’m pretty sure it’s normal. Consider bittersweet – a combination of feeling a fond memory and knowing it’s no longer there. Funerals and weddings are full of mixed feelings. Funerals have that same bittersweet quality but even more so. They can be full of love for the departed and love among the friends and family, and great sadness that they are no longer here. At a wedding there is such happiness from the parents as they see their beautiful children grown up, while also feeling some loss that their children are no longer little ones, but grown up.

 What are you feeling right now? All of them!