We have an emoji for everything, don’t we? We even had an Emoji Movie. (long pause) Does anyone even remember it? (silence)
I begin with emojis here because they have become our current era’s way of expressing emotion, and how we express emotion often defines its reality and validity for us as human beings.
Consider it. Social media has given us a new relationship with emojis, and we all know how influential social media is in our lives. Think of all the ways you can like someone’s Facebook post. And if you’re not into FB, then think of the icons on IG, or in the Twitter-sphere. If you’re like me, you sometimes have “arguments” (or tug-of-war) with yourself about which emoji / icon you’ll use to “comment” with. These arguments aren’t out loud. They’re the back and forth you do hitting the links on your phone… Thumbs up… No, the Cares emoji… No, the Heart. But do I want to Heart this person? How will they take it? Better just hit the Thumbs Up this time… Now the typing back and forth may be complete, but the emotional back and forth goes on.
With our Avatars, our Bitmojis’s, in our text messages, there are some emojis many of us will never use. Or maybe, you’re like me again, and in these times of pandemic and pandemonium, all bets are off. Every emoji is up for grabs. Before, I hardly ever used the downright angry, the really frustrated, or the tragically sad emojis. They just seemed like, well, too much emoji. But now… it’s on.
And emojis are really just these cutesy expressions of our emotions, right? This way of taming down the impact of our emotional diatribe, if you will, on each other? I mean, doesn’t it lessen the blow for our most emotional outbursts? You can’t take an emoji seriously… can you?
Emojis bring levity to what can be heavy. Emojis bring a cartoonish fancy to our internal conflict. (But does Perplexed Emoji exist? What about Befuddled Emoji?) However, our use of them halts long before resolving our love-hate relationship with our emotional life as human beings. They are far too fanciful to be up to this task. This is a complex and complicated long-standing matter that even this article isn’t looking to tackle.
So since we’re not looking for resolution, let’s simply begin with some understanding, eh? Because emotions can be tools for the creation of our lives.
the very essence of our living…
We are emotional beings – our very existence is predicated on both our thoughts and our emotions. Yet somehow we often relate to our emotions like they are the bags we’d rather not carry on the plane. “Just shove those down in cargo. They’ll hold there until I pick ’em up later (… if ever).”
Here are some words that give definition to our relationship to emotion. These are the definitions as given by Merriam-Webster.
emotional –
- of or relating to emotion;
- dominated by or prone to emotion;
- appealing to or arousing emotion;
- markedly aroused or agitated in feeling or sensibilities
That first definition seems pretty benign, right? But that 2nd definition… that’s the one that best characterizes how we use the word “emotional” today.
Notice that key phrase “dominated by“… and there it is – our relationship to our emotions. For many of us, our perception is that we are dominated by or prone to those crazy, sometimes effed up things we call, emotions. For many of us, we live simply reacting to our emotions, even when we know our most wonderful experiences of life are predicated on our ability to respond and not react. Reaction being the baseline, and response being transcendence.
To be human is to have emotions, and to be an emotional being.
the (r)evolution of bliss
Okay, now here is another word that describes our relationship to emotion. You’ll recognize it easily when I put it in that context.
passionate –
- having, showing or expressing strong emotions or beliefs;
- expressing or relating to strong sexual or romantic feelings
Now, you may have to really perk up here to hear what I’m saying because you’ve heard these two words before and frankly, neither of them are remarkable.
But what may begin to stand out is that one has definitions that give it a negative slant, and the other has definitions that give it a positive slant. There is a marked difference in the way each word is defined, but … there is also a marked similarity.
Passionate has the intrinsically positive slant. Why does it? Who knows why? Not our point. The point here goes to, who wouldn’t want to be passionate about what they believe in? Who wouldn’t want to be passionate about the person they care about? Maybe a rare few who are living lives of quiet desperation and prefer to remain quiet about it, but mostly social media speaks so often today to how many of us want to live our lives out loud. Passion plays a big part of that.
But let’s be frank, how many of us want to be “emotional?”
And yet we are emotional. We are emotional beings. No way around it. Both definitions speak to being emotional. But “passion” speaks to a strength and “emotional” speaks to weakness.
Let’s look at those definitions again…
emotional –
- dominated by or prone to emotion;
passionate –
- having, showing or expressing strong emotions or beliefs;
I show these meanings to show that we have created go-to definitions to match our current-day perceptions of our emotions.
I mean think of it. Don’t we think of women as emotional? And men as passionate?
Don’t we also think of women as the weaker sex? And don’t we think of men, the stronger sex, as passionate when we see them having strong emotions in the office or in a position of authority, just as much as in a romantic situation? Before you take any offense to my use of old norms… Yes, I have resorted to their use, but in a lot of ways, we all do when we define strength and weakness for ourselves. We just aren’t always aware of it when we do.
To all those who accuse me of presenting a gender bias, I am. But not because I believe in one, I do not. I present it as being at the forefront of our perception of emotion and being emotional that is inherently present in our definitions of words like “passionate” and “emotional.” I bring up these ideas not to create a gender divide, but to point out how often our relationship to our emotions, in general, is already divided and categorized.
We are emotional beings, and whether we consider it strength and admirable, or weakness and detrimental, will color, influence and impact how we are able to use emotion to create our lives.
It is our thinking that begins the process of creating our lives, but it is emotion that gives our creativity buoyancy. Thought is the first step, but emotion is the more potent step because emotion attunes us to the frequency of our desire. Emotion sets the tone for how we co-create with Source, the Universe, God, Allah, Yahweh, G*d – whatever you call the higher power you work with.
… I’ll say it again: We are emotional beings – beings with both thoughts and emotions. We have a thought and what follows that thought is a feeling. The design of our humanity is that simple. What becomes more complex is how we use the next step to fulfill our desires.
Interesting. What if acknowledging our emotions – that they are an integral part of our experience as human beings – gave us strength and power to create our lives in a fashion that greatly surprised us? What if that strength and power was predicated on our acknowledgement of our vulnerability – simply, our ability to be seen as our authentic selves?
What if ignoring and avoiding our emotions just made us numb and dead inside, feeling powerless? What if this experience of numbness and being dead inside robbed us of our presence of mind and our ability to access our intelligence within?
Emotions as powerful tools for creation… What do you feel about that?
(And are you willing to create an emoji for that feeling without having to get credit or royalties for it? … Just askin’.)
updated as of June 8, 2021
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