Lately I've been really uncontrollably happy. When I say uncontrollably, I mean that there doesn't seem to be any controllers- no REASONS for the happiness. For example: I was walking out of work the other day and I said to myself "I don't remember where I parked my car," and suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter. I didn't really think that what I had said was funny, I was just overcome with intense joy. From way, way, deep inside of me, not laughter that I can say has ever come from someone else. That was epiphany #1- that really crazy feeling of joy has never come from someone else. It has only ever come from me. Which led to EP#2:
I believe that we can only feel emotions and feelings that already exist within us. People, stimuli, work, art, food, music-- they all access those emotions differently. So when I think of people as these banks of emotions, I realize that I can make a decision about which emotion I want to access and stimulate. And even more importantly- I can acknowledge when someone else is accessing emotions that I don't want to feel... and move away from them. Those people do not CAUSE pain, or CAUSE happiness. They just ACCESS it within me. They bring it to the forefront. I have pain inside of me already. (EP#3: If you have happiness, you also have pain. Both emotions have to exist- they're like a sphere. One pole is happiness, one pole pain. It makes more sense for happiness and pain to be the same sphere than for them to be different emotions. They are usually accessed by the same people or situations, just oppositely. Joe Blow makes you 567 points worth of happy? Guaranteed he can bring out 567 points worth of sad. That doesn't mean he will... he just CAN.)
Another important part of that epiphany is that Happiness is Already Inside of Me. And if anyone in the world knows how to get to it, it's me. ME. I Can Access My Happiness At Any Time if I Am Being Healthy And Paying Attention To Myself. That's the truth... which leads into epiphany #4:
Truth and happiness and pain and all of these abstract things that are extremely and universally difficult to define-- they definitely exist. The reason they are so hard to define is because they only exist abstractly until someone translates them. So each of us have our own translation of those truths, those abstractions. Originally I thought that maybe these things existed as Objective Things, and we all had different perspectives on them. But now I think that instead of looking AT them, they don't really have a location until we give them one. They just sort of float around haphazardly until someone decides to have them accessed. Little clouds of abstraction trailing behind us until someone, something, sticks their hand through us and pulls it to them. That's the trick though- in that pull, something changes- we affect those abstractions with ourselves. When they get pulled from abstraction into reality, the concretion of the emotion is only formed by US. So that's why it's so difficult to define- we only know our very own interpretations, our very own translations of these abstract things, these huge, surreal things. Which brings me to EP#5:
Translation. One night I was watching
A Beautiful Mind and started crying, then laughing through my tears, and then that same uncontrolled emotion thing started happening- the physical, emotional drive of something beyond me started spiraling and shooting me off in crazy directions. In the midst of all of that, my stupid earthly brain could only think of how great it would be to WRITE ABOUT IT. The translation, of COURSE. No wonder I am so obsessed with writing. That's the way I translate things. Some people find their translation in art, others in sports, others in religion or politics or music or family or pencils... who knows... my translation is writing. I have uncontrollable emotional things happening to me and what I have control over is my translation. Since my translation is simply how those abstractions move through me-- I have to be really careful what I fill myself up with so that the translation is something I like.
It's double tiered, really: I can't control who pulls emotion from me or what emotion they pull from me. I can move away from things I don't particularly like, and I can certainly focus on things that I do like. And when I do focus on things that are beneficial to me, then me, the catalyst, will become more of what I want to be- and then my translations will automatically reflect this. Little things, from what I eat to whom I speak to all the way up to whom I love and how I love them and then back down to the way I speak to strangers on airplanes and the way I look at the CEO of the company in the hallway all the way up to what I read and how I write and with whom I dream. It makes a difference now, not just because I will affect them, which is of course important, but in a different way, how it will affect ME-- and MY translation of these abstractions. It's all I really have in life, I think.
Why worry about tests or money or drama when there are abstractions, beautiful things to be toyed with and cradled and manipulated and drawn out and poured into molds and shaped and displayed? These beauties are not to be squandered. It is no longer a matter of perspective, but now a matter of PERCEPTION. You can look at things from every angle possible, and that's important and helpful. But you must learn to perceive things differently and in the way you want to perceive them if you want to partake of these divinities.
