Emotional Extremes

“Goodbye.”

“Take care of yourself.”

He turned around and left. She looked at him as he walked away and wondered what she was feeling that day. She saw the same person in the same place, and they always exchanged the same words, but today her heart was filled with pity. Once upon a time, the feeling filling her heart was love. Then it was pure hatred. Today it was pity. At what he has become. Her emotions have covered the whole range from one extreme to the other. Sometimes she wondered if both love and hate were just on opposite sides of a single coin. Maybe what mattered was how it was flipped. Maybe what mattered was what caused it to flip at that second. Maybe the common denominator – the thing out of which the coin was made – was passion. Or maybe it was just raw emotion; unnamed; unfiltered; unaltered.

So this piece has been bothering me for a few days now, random words in a random context, but it made me think about human emotions and how they affect us in our daily lives. On one hand, emotions such as hatred, anxiety or anger can distort somebody’s judgment or change their actions. But then on the other hand, suppressing these emotions can lead to an emotional build-up that causes sudden rapture and that might end up badly. So it might make you wonder, do you suppress your emotions or do you find yourself a nice comfortable couch and pay an amount of money to a shrink to listen to you?

Some people have an amazing quality of using powerful emotions such as pain to fuel their journey towards success. They are the ones who might have had sadistic childhoods that might make other people criminals. Or maybe they lived in a world full of fear and scarcity, half the time wishing they wouldn’t wake up the next day. Or maybe they sleep under the stars  because there’s no roof above their heads.

Yet maybe they’re the ones who carried the pain of yesterday to develop compassion and start campaigns to help tomorrow’s children. Or maybe their world that is full of scarcity has tuned their senses to observing the unmaterialistic aspects of life. Or maybe, while they’re sleeping under the stars, they dream of a more beautiful place they might end up in tomorrow.

The point is, they make use of their situation, whatever it is, for the betterment of themselves, and more importantly, for the betterment of mankind.

dreaming about a more beautiful place they might end up in tomorrow. Yet they use all those negative emotions, and turn them around into something positive, adding to society through pieces of art that only a few experts would understand.

“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” Kenji Miyazawa

“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him”