I haven’t written anything here in this blog since I got done with all that cancer stuff. It’s a shame really, that I just haven’t had the time to write and be “self-indulgent”… that I got distracted by the the mobility afforded by good health. Also, once I stopped having something “severe” to manage, I pretty much slid back into a mode where I just sweat the smaller stuff, and trivial stuff pretend to be a whole lot more substantial than they really are. But oh well…at least I caught myself.
To the point – there are no opposites. I think I saw this as a status update recently on Facebook by Paalu, whom I love sitting next to. There are no opposites. We had a similar discussion once in our meditation class, that love and hate are the same thing, and that they cannot exist without the other. And this is the case with many things – happiness/sadness, anger/acceptance (not sure if this is the opposite), etc, etc…and we all need to find the balance – the middle way. And of course at that time, I regarded all that as cheese ball talk. Happiness sure as hell does not feel like sadness, and balance sounds like a compromise.
A few days ago, it made sense to me. On a train, it made sense to me. I was thinking of something, something good and sweet. And I was awashed with this feeling…you know the way you feel when you see something incredibly touching on TV? However, this time, I isolated this feeling and….physically, it just felt like my heart swelled, like something inside my chest stirred. And this feeling is exactly the same one that I get when something bad happens and I say “my heart collapsed”. It feels the same. If i isolate this feeling, devoid of emotion, it is just that – a feeling, like when cloth touches my skin or wind on my face or water on my hands. The feeling is simply of something stirring in my chest. And when I attach an emotion to it, when I attach an interpretation to it, then it becomes sadness – heartbroken and defeated; or something good like happiness – contentment and gratitude or even triumph. So there are no opposites in that sense (when we talk about our emotions). It is just energy moving within us, and sometimes this energy becomes larger, smaller, faster, slower, spurred by situations and incidents. We feel our energy doing all of that, and if we can understand that what we are feeling is just the movement of this energy, and that we can choose what emotion to attach to it, or better yet, choose to not attach any emotion to it, then I guess, we’re on our way to the middle.
