Ah, emotions. Depending on your viewpoint they can single handedly catapult you into a euphoric, smiling stupor or pull you into an insurmountable abyss or perhaps unearth long suppressed agonies that are best left in their soulful grave. Sometimes they just shake you from your coma and you come out in a field of Alaskan paintbrush flowers as you inhale deeply and gaze upon the captivating landscape and feel renewed. Whichever way you view it, it is unlikely that you go through your entire life in a hummed monotone and when you vary from that centering pitch emotionally, odds are there are long lasting implications.
The trick is whether you want this variance to be seen as creating scars that will be eternal reminders of the roller coaster or as healing salve that that steels your resolve and gives you a whole new foundation of perspective. I think we all come pre-programmed with the ability to channel our life experiences in a constructive way BUT it comes password protected. We have to unlock it in order to be able to use it. How the heck do we do that? Constant trial and error over a series of life experiences? Is there an instruction manual? Medically prescribed flat-lining? Refusal to adapt? There is no set answer. It’s part of the challenge of being human. YOU have to figure it out. No one can tell you. They can tell you their experience and it may help guide you to the answer but ultimately the answer has to be yours and you have to own it and be responsible for the collateral implications. They are rhetorical questions (or at least questions that are maybe best left to be answered in our own head or with those whom we are very trusting of): How do we cope with the down? How do we embrace the up? How do we temper both so that the regression to the mean isn’t so precipitous that it requires a trip to a decompression chamber?….