Emotions versus Pickles
Posted by Sarah Mills on Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Under: Wonders of Life
Like pickles, emotions can be sweet or sour. We also tend to keep our emotions in bottles sometimes. The difference between emotions and pickles is that emotions tend to expand when in a jar, while pickles tend to stay just the same fresh and crunchy. Picking an emotion out of the jar is like reaching into a lucky packet...you often get a surprise. While theoretically the emotion is in the jar to keep it safe, it often backfires when we least expect it. It's confusing to think that we're keeping ourselves safe by separating ourselves from our feelings, when by doing that we're actually letting the bomb tick. It might be useful to put our emotions neatly stored away for now, but when the pressure hits and things get busy, the emotions pop right back up and scream 'DEAL WITH ME' in the middle of an important meeting. The very act of avoiding that experience is actually part of creating that experience.
Much the same as never knowing how juicy a pickle will be until you've tasted it, experiencing an emotion is different to imagining it. Curiously we're cognitively disposed to imagining the past in terms of our current emotional state. This means that our feelings about the past are tainted by how we're feeling right now, and we know how that changes all the time. Practically it's tough to project how we'll feel in the future too. Our brains don't store feelings, only memories of feelings which tend to lessen in intensity over time. This means that it's unlikely that whatever we can imagine will align with how we experience it in reality.
Look at it in terms of fear: False Experiences Appearing Real - FEAR. You're imagining all these terrible things and freaking out about them now, but when you're in that situation you imagined, it always turns out differently. And it's a brain function! My curiosity is sparked because of this cognitive bias. Basically research has shown that people are physically prone to delusions. We're preprogrammed to create things that don't exist. Think about it. Fear is only one example. The imagination process can be used for both positive and negative creations.
It may seem that being disposed to create delusions is unproductive, unhelpful, destructive, regressive or whatever you can think of, and you're right. We are able to do that. However, we're taught not to because of societal values. Instead we're encouraged to use this brain function for progressive things. We're taught to create new ideas, to be innovative, to use our own initiative, to grow ourselves. We use this imaginative process to be creative and original...to dream up new things.
The only difference between a delusion and an idea is that delusions refer to things which cannot be brought into reality. That's the tricky thing about emotions...often they seem like ideas, often that actually are just memories. Since there's no fixed external reference point for your emotions, it can be tough to figure out what you're feeling, if it's real, and what to do with it. As much as we can stick a label on an emotion, we can't qualitatively describe it in rational words. We can talk about the situation around the emotion and the results of the emotion, but capturing that emotion is impossible without actually experiencing it.
Perhaps this is why we like to stick our emotions into bottles. We like the idea that if we label, categorise and file them, we have some sort of tool to manage them. The only thing is, that keeping them in bottles causes them to explode, or implode. We're creating bombs by managing our emotions this way. Now I won't claim to have found a new way, but I do know how unhelpful bottling emotions is.
Ideally we'd love our emotions to be like pickles in jars, neatly stacked and identifiable, freshly sealed away and preserved. To me it seems that there is an element missing in this process. We seem to forget something important that should stop them from exploding. We like to call it the human element, the failure curse, the imperfection complex. We like to use it as an excuse, a reason why things don't work out the way we think they should. However, we forget to realise that we're predisposed to creating delusions. We forget that we've imagined our own problems and have acted them out to make them real.
It's like we've sealed our bottles of emotions with paper, with a thin gauze that looks airtight but really isn't. It's like we've put emotional timers in the bottles to explode when we're not looking. It all comes back to our cognitive bias and our ability to create both positive and negative events. We're relying too much on the past and the future we have imagined, and not on what is actually happening right now. Right now is ever changing and it's scary, but sitting on bottles of explosive jars seems far more risky than creating things as we go along.
The choice is yours really, how you want to construct your life. I can't tell you what's right or wrong or even possible. As far as I'm concerned I've beaten the impossible before so there's no reason to construct limitations on what I can create in the future. That would simply be backwards, and I rather like to think I'm on the cutting edge looking forward. Just like biting into a sweet sour pickle!
Much the same as never knowing how juicy a pickle will be until you've tasted it, experiencing an emotion is different to imagining it. Curiously we're cognitively disposed to imagining the past in terms of our current emotional state. This means that our feelings about the past are tainted by how we're feeling right now, and we know how that changes all the time. Practically it's tough to project how we'll feel in the future too. Our brains don't store feelings, only memories of feelings which tend to lessen in intensity over time. This means that it's unlikely that whatever we can imagine will align with how we experience it in reality.
Look at it in terms of fear: False Experiences Appearing Real - FEAR. You're imagining all these terrible things and freaking out about them now, but when you're in that situation you imagined, it always turns out differently. And it's a brain function! My curiosity is sparked because of this cognitive bias. Basically research has shown that people are physically prone to delusions. We're preprogrammed to create things that don't exist. Think about it. Fear is only one example. The imagination process can be used for both positive and negative creations.
It may seem that being disposed to create delusions is unproductive, unhelpful, destructive, regressive or whatever you can think of, and you're right. We are able to do that. However, we're taught not to because of societal values. Instead we're encouraged to use this brain function for progressive things. We're taught to create new ideas, to be innovative, to use our own initiative, to grow ourselves. We use this imaginative process to be creative and original...to dream up new things.
The only difference between a delusion and an idea is that delusions refer to things which cannot be brought into reality. That's the tricky thing about emotions...often they seem like ideas, often that actually are just memories. Since there's no fixed external reference point for your emotions, it can be tough to figure out what you're feeling, if it's real, and what to do with it. As much as we can stick a label on an emotion, we can't qualitatively describe it in rational words. We can talk about the situation around the emotion and the results of the emotion, but capturing that emotion is impossible without actually experiencing it.
Perhaps this is why we like to stick our emotions into bottles. We like the idea that if we label, categorise and file them, we have some sort of tool to manage them. The only thing is, that keeping them in bottles causes them to explode, or implode. We're creating bombs by managing our emotions this way. Now I won't claim to have found a new way, but I do know how unhelpful bottling emotions is.
Ideally we'd love our emotions to be like pickles in jars, neatly stacked and identifiable, freshly sealed away and preserved. To me it seems that there is an element missing in this process. We seem to forget something important that should stop them from exploding. We like to call it the human element, the failure curse, the imperfection complex. We like to use it as an excuse, a reason why things don't work out the way we think they should. However, we forget to realise that we're predisposed to creating delusions. We forget that we've imagined our own problems and have acted them out to make them real.
It's like we've sealed our bottles of emotions with paper, with a thin gauze that looks airtight but really isn't. It's like we've put emotional timers in the bottles to explode when we're not looking. It all comes back to our cognitive bias and our ability to create both positive and negative events. We're relying too much on the past and the future we have imagined, and not on what is actually happening right now. Right now is ever changing and it's scary, but sitting on bottles of explosive jars seems far more risky than creating things as we go along.
The choice is yours really, how you want to construct your life. I can't tell you what's right or wrong or even possible. As far as I'm concerned I've beaten the impossible before so there's no reason to construct limitations on what I can create in the future. That would simply be backwards, and I rather like to think I'm on the cutting edge looking forward. Just like biting into a sweet sour pickle!
In : Wonders of Life