One of the most overlooked areas of observation is the study of the self. By this, I’m not talking about narcissistically preening in front of a mirror. In fact, I believe there is too much emphasis in our culture on the awareness of physical appearance. I’m talking about becoming aware of the contents of one’s own heart and mind.
Just as an audit of receipts reveals our financial priorities, an audit of one’s emotions reveals what really matters to us. They reveal our thoughts. Emotions never exist in a vacuum, but always arise from the context of our mental and physical landscape. When we have a hard time seeing that landscape, our emotions do a good job of giving us clues to find out what’s going on. Everyone has emotions. They’re built into our physiology. Some of them even register as physical pain in their more intense forms. The basic emotions of happiness, sadness, and fear all have very important roles to play in our survival. Most of us want to spend as much time as possible experiencing the various forms of happiness, but the emotions more often classified as negative—the various forms of sadness and fear—are also rather important because they act as indicators of what’s important to us in a more acute way than happiness does. We like living in a state of happiness because that emotion is designed to indicate that things are going well. The various shades of happiness range from contentment to euphoria with many shades in between. Euphoria, while deeply enjoyable, is unsustainable because it’s sort of built for those exceptional occasions in which things are truly going amazingly, swimmingly well. I’m guessing that the only people experiencing euphoria right now are those who are either on drugs (a way of tricking the body’s internal logic), suffering from bipolar disorder (a mental illness that also messes with the body’s internal logic in some fascinating ways), or are celebrating a truly major milestone like an engagement or the birth of a child. Contentment, on the other hand, can be achieved simply by getting one’s thoughts and beliefs in line and can be experienced in some of the harshest corners of the human condition. “Simply” may be the wrong word to describe that process. It’s the work of a lifetime to organize one’s thoughts and beliefs in such a manner that one can be content in all circumstances. There’s a practice called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that revolves around this issue, and the book describing how to do it is hundreds of pages thick. It’s a good read, though, and well worth the trouble if, like me, you naturally spend a lot of time in the other two primary emotions: sadness and fear. Sadness has a range from mild disappointment to full-blown depression. Somewhere in between, often mixed with fear, is anger. This classification of emotion is about loss. The bigger the loss, the bigger the emotion. If you are feeling sadder than usual right now, it’s only to be expected. You’ve lost some things that are kind of important to being human, like regular social contact with people you don’t live with and the ability to come and go as you please. The amount of sadness you’re experiencing right now is directly related to how much you valued what’s been lost. The bigger the loss, the more of a grieving process you have to go through to reach contentment again. Sometimes, when the sadness of the loss is really strong, we try to shortcut that grieving process by clinging to the things that make us happy. This can be important to do if the pain of the sadness might otherwise be strong enough to kill or debilitate you, but it tends to postpone, not cancel out, the work of grieving that still needs to happen. The work of grieving involves acknowledging the loss and learning how to live in a world without the person or thing we loved. For a smaller loss, like a canceled walk with a friend, this goes by quickly: “I’ll miss seeing so-and-so. We’ll try again in a few months!” You find something else to do with the time, and you move on. When you lose something as big as a person you love, though, it’s a far lengthier and more complex process that will require some measure of your attention here or there for years—possibly the rest of your life. Fortunately, if you are intentional about the grieving process, the sadness will grow less intense as time goes by and you will come to the point where you can remember what you lost with fond nostalgia, rather than heart-rending pain. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is all about the possibility of loss. It ranges from mild jitters to abject, heart-stopping terror. Anger, as a hybrid emotion, also has its place here. Fear exists to make us careful, but more than the other primary emotions, fear tends to shortcut our rationality. There’s a good reason for this: fear exists to protect us from danger of various kinds. God in His mercy designed us with fear to keep us from destroying ourselves too easily. Unfortunately, because this particular emotion is so sensitive, most of us are afraid of things that wouldn’t actually hurt us very much. For example, I am afraid of objects flying near my face. I’ve never had great hand-eye coordination, and am not confident of my catching skills on any level. My depth perception isn’t great, either. PE was terrifying for me growing up not because I lacked athleticism—on school breaks I would do some truly impressive hikes with my aunt and uncle—but because most PE classes are actually about team sports that tend to revolve around flying objects. Baseball season was the worst. Eventually my PE teacher gave up trying to work with me on it and let me get more exercise than the rest of the class by walking laps around the field while they were playing. Is that a life-threatening situation? No. Was there the potential for injury there? Sure, but no more than some of the risky outdoor sports I engaged in during my free time. I genuinely would have preferred to jump out of a plane than play baseball. My mind was simply more scared of the known potential injury of being hit in the face than actual mortal peril. I took time to write about that because so much of what we fear is not actually that dangerous. The degree to which we fear things is not about the actual danger, but how we perceive danger. I’m guessing that my fear of flying objects was almost as much about the fear of being laughed at by classmates as it was about physical injury. I was actually capable of playing catch with people I trusted out of sight of the known bullies in my class. When we experience fear, it can be important to consider what we’re perceiving as danger, and why. By noticing these emotions as they go by and sorting out what they mean, we can make better choices. Rightly calibrated, our emotions give us good cues about our environment, but they easily drift out of whack with reality. We need to pay attention to that so as to bring them back into their rightful place. We can’t know if the signal lights are broken if we aren’t even looking at them in the first place. Take a few moments each day to reflect on and name the emotions you’ve experienced. If something seems out of place, ask yourself why. You might be amazed what you discover.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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