The Flavours of Life
Do you remember those times when you were sick and could not taste or smell anything? How, despite different textures, food kind of blended in a mixture of sameness? Suddenly, eating did not create that warm and happy, satisfied feeling anymore that usually accompanies a really good meal. Instead, it became boring, until your senses returned, and you were able to taste your food once more.
And how about the time you were looking at a wonderful painting? Imagine that, instead of the explosion of colors, all you would see was an ocean of white. Without the fifty shades of grey, which can tilt a drawing from being nice to being great. Now, imagine the world looking like that: all white, with black contours to make out the different objects and people. Would you still like it? Would you still be touched in ways you cannot describe, watching the sun set and turning the sky in different shades of identical white? Would you be in awe of that colorfully white butterfly passing by? Would you be able to drown into the snow-white eyes of your beloved?
What would it be like, then, if everything felt the same? If there was no difference between the comforting touch of a mother’s embrace, or the burning pain of a hot flame, between the passionate heat between two lovers and the freezing cold of the snow, between the hard sensation of concrete and your soft and comfortable bed. Would you still enjoy touching, being touched, in that case
What if everything tasted the same, smelt the same, looked the same, felt the same? One of the first things we would lose, one of the things we would miss the most — even more so than the color, or taste, or touch — are our emotions. Emotions are the colors of our worlds. Love, hate, happiness, fear, and all their variations are the spices of every experience we have, indeed the flavors of life itself. They touch our hearts. Without them, life would be colorless, tasteless, and without any warmth.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, emotions can be defined as “instinctive or intuitive feelings, as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge” (lexico.com). This one sentence, as a cutting edge, daftly divides between the ordinary feelings of the beastly body and the extraordinary capacities of the human mind. Often, when it comes to emotions, we are dealing with or controlling them, as if they are an inconvenience, something preferably not to be felt. Something to be suppressed, even. Simultaneously, we have built a society that worships ratio and our capacity to use our minds. Somehow, we have managed to oppose to each other two entities that are so strongly intertwined, that they are one. Many thoughts are cause for emotion. Think of the difference you feel when you think: (s)he hates me vs. (s)he loves me. While these are, in fact, thoughts, you will feel miserable thinking someone you care about deeply hates you, while when you believe, when you think, they love you, you will most likely feel quite differently. Oppositely, emotions or emotional states are often the cause of specific thoughts. We look at the world through glasses, and often the color of those glasses is determined by our emotional state.
So why the split? Why, if mind and body are one, and if emotions are what connects them, worship one and suppress the other? This seems to be tightly connected to our need to separate us from this world; our need to believe that we are more, better, smarter than this planet we are part of. As such, the body and its emotions, are a reminder of our animal nature. It is a primal tie to our mammal family; a tie to nature itself. In our desire to distinguish ourselves from our origin, emotions became an inconvenient reminder of something we would rather forget, while our brains, our capacity for rational thinking, were so unique in this natural world that they truly set us apart.
Yet, it is in this need for separation that also lies our biggest pitfalls, as life is about connection. From the moment we take form, inside of a womb and linked to our mother through an umbilical cord, to those moments after birth where that union takes shape through skin touch and warm hugs, to bonding on an emotional level with people around us as we grow up, connection is everywhere.
More and more, growing up in a society where things have become impersonalized and computerized, where mass production has become the norm rather than the exception, and where work pressure has grown so much that people sometimes feel guilty for wanting to spend time with their family instead of finishing up on work, we are starting to feel disconnected, not only from each other but from life itself. We have forgotten that this beautiful journey of re-connecting, whether it is with ourselves, with loved ones, with strangers, or with nature, is what life is all about. It’s inevitable that if humanity wants to survive, we need to find a way to connect again.
And the way to connect is through our emotions. Allowing our emotions to be felt again. Feeling again the warmth of the friendship, the beauty of a sunset, and the magnificence of a starry night. Experiencing the emotions they evoke in us. And accepting that, if we want to enjoy the pleasant emotions, other not-as-nice emotions might make an appearance too. Because how do you recognize joy, if you have never been sad before?
“Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you” (Roger Ebert)
Emotions not only connect us with the world, but they also connect us with ourselves. They point us in a direction. Not just any direction: our direction. Like a personal compass, they point us in the direction to navigate life. If we listen, they share clues with us, of the path we should follow; not because others deem it best, but because that’s the path that is befitting to us.
