Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about different approaches to emotions. One approach says that you should feel whatever emotions come up, allow them to be, and avoid trying to suppress them, repress them, or force them to be anything other than what they are. Emotions are there for a reason: they’re tools that can help us and we should listen to them when we come up, even if they’re emotions that are commonly seen as negative such as anger, sadness, depression, frustration, jealously, etc. This approach maintains that there’s no such thing as a bad emotion. Some emotions may be unpleasant to experience but ultimately they’re not negative because those emotions may be there to protect us from things that could hurt us, motivate us to do the right thing, and so on. Another approach that says that our emotions shouldn’t control us, we should control them. We should be able to change our emotions if we want so that we can get into a good mood if we’re in a bad mood and not be weighted down so much by stuff in life. In Buddhism, there’s the notion that suffering comes from attachments and suffering can be ended while we’re still alive (this is known as, “enlightenment” which is often used to mean “no suffering”) through breaking attachments.
I understand both approaches and there are things that make sense to me about both. Which one I like better depends on what’s going on within me. I’m going through a hard time right now and in my worst moments, I think that it would be nice to not feel anything just so that I could avoid feeling so bad. It would be nice if these unpleasant emotions were just not there any longer. I feel like I’m always telling them “I get it, I’m going through a hard time and I have a pretty good idea as to why. Now can you please leave me alone so I can feel ok?” Times like these make the idea of being free from suffering and not having to deal with sadness, anger, anxiety, depression, and so on seem like a pretty good deal.
There are other times, though, in which dealing with any particular emotion seems like a good thing. If I’m feeling happy or joyful or even just feeling at peace, then I’m grateful to be able to feel something, even unpleasant emotions. In those moments, trying to avoid suffering by getting rid of all emotional attachments seems inhuman to me (such as what I’ve written before about how our emotions separate us from machines). The idea of not experiencing certain emotions seems to me to require not experiencing any emotions at all or being completely detached from them, and that doesn’t sound like any way to live. I get what Buddhism says about attachments leading to suffering, but what is the solution? Just don’t form attachments? Don’t get attached to the people I love and don’t get attached to activities that make me feel happy and alive? I may be coming at this the wrong way. Maybe those with this perspective mean something different than what I think they mean but that’s how it comes across to me.
Not having attachments or expectations as a way to avoid feeling down and to avoid unpleasant emotions doesn’t sound like a life I’d enjoy. A different approach that sounds much better to me is having my expectations set at a more reasonable level, such as expecting there to be a lot more traffic during rush hour than other times of the day so that I’m not surprised or frustrated by getting stuck in traffic. However, while that approach may work well in some situations, I don’t think it works well in all situations. Where should my expectations be set for a movie that I’m really looking forward to watching? Should I have low expectations so that I avoid being disappointed if it turns out to be less good than I was hoping it’d be? Should I have my expectations set high and maybe risk being disappointed?
I don’t have answers at this point. This post is not building toward a particular conclusion that I think solves this whole puzzle. I might get there someday but today is not that day. This is just me sharing where I’m at now and what I think about all this. And maybe, like my answer with just about everything else, some middle ground with a balance between each of the above approaches is the way to go. What that balance is and how to get there, I don’t know. Right now that’s just an idea I have. To close, Bob Ross once talked about how you have to have both light and dark in painting as well as in life and that we need a little sadness once in a while to know when the good times come. Like Ross in that clip, I’m also waiting on the good times now and I hope they come soon.