FADES IN THE BACKGROUND

So I was chatting it up on facebook with a friend of mine whom I haven't talked with in a long time. One of those friends that you always got along with but time and space just got in the way. Well there we were, she and I were gabbing on about our love for Scrabble and how we can't find anyone to play with us anymore as if no time had passed.

As time walked on in the conversation my grandmother's passing came up and my friend brought up her mother and how this past year was the year that marked my friend being alive longer than she knew her mother. I don't know why, but i teared up. I cried (and I am not a crier.) My friend talked about going to Italy because she realized that life is too short and you can't wait around to accomplish your goals. She talked about how her mother's death taught her that lesson. And as I was talking about my grandmother I started realizing how special that woman was cause of how she treated and loved everyone, despite her sharp wit and tongue.

However, this is not a "life-is-short" blog; we all know that lesson. However, as time marches on we talk less and less about our loved ones that have passed; or we stop discussing why the person we are with or why our family is important to us; or we stop mentioning the things that our loved ones did for us (no matter how small.) This is a very dangerous thing to stop talking about.

If we stop bringing these things up from time to time then they begin to fade into the background and just become the pieces of cloth that is on our skin, and they no longer are the threads that binds the cloths together. These are the things that make us whole. The way someone completes us, the lesson we learned when the person passed, or the little thing that someone did that made us go, "that is why i love them." Those are the threads.

For example, take it whenever in life you learned that important life lesson of "life is short" That time when we learned that lesson helped us put into perspective that hose dreams we have for ourselves or the goals of traveling or whatever are slowly losing time. Therefore that lesson is the thread that can sew the dream to the reality.

Or: maybe the person we love is getting on our deepest nerves one day, almost to the point of us just wanting to walk away. That memory of the time they let you sing in the car without asking you to shut up could be thread that holds the walking away to staying together.

We can't stop talking about these important things. These are the moments in life when we had realizations; when something that never made sense before became clear, and if we mention those moments but then begin to walk away from them and lose them out of our vocabulary, then we tend to go back to the way we were before the lesson was learned. What progress have we made when we do that?

So I say that if your grandmother made you realize that goals are to be accomplished or if your special someone put a note of gratitude in your car visor and you understood why you were with that person, or if your dog wanting you to love on him made you realize that simple things are important too, than don't stop talking about it. Mention it. Bring it up. And keep in mind that the friends that roll their eyes at the cheesiness of the conversation are the friends that haven't learned that you have to mention these things, cause these are the things that are the fabric of true happiness.

It's not achieving the goal that is the true joy, it is the moment when you realize you can do it.

Emotional Food Groups Pt. 1

I have a theory about emotions. I believe that all emotions that we can feel fall under four major categories: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, and Anger. Every other feeling live under varying degrees of these four. For example, jealousy (anger), depression (sadness), paranoia (fear), etc. However with all the emotions in the world I think that there is only one that doesn't belong to any one category: Love.

Though some emotions may cross lines with one of the four emotions above (I.E. Greed: fear and happiness or jealousy: fear and anger), no single emotion is able to cross all four categories such as love. Love is all of those things, sometimes at once. (But we'll save that for another blog)

Imagine this: happiness, sadness, fear and anger are the four food groups. You need every single one of those in your life in order to challenge, develop, or even relax yourself.

Just like the food groups, you cannot be truly healthy by seperating them. For example, how can you truly know how thrilling that soccor game win is if you have never lost those four in a row? How can you know how beautiful life can really be, until you have touched the edge of death? How thrilling can that lottery win be, if you have never had a single day of struggle?

Just like the four food groups, if you have too much of one food, then you are not giving your body the nutrients it needs in order to sustain a healthy daily life. Have you ever notice how annoyed we get when we are around a person who feels only one of those emotions all the time? It grates our nerves. Think about people you know who are alwasys sad, always angry, always scared, or always happy even (sometimes they seem to be the most frustrating.)

However, on the opposite side of the token if we don't have enough of one emotion it can be detremental to our well being. Think about those people who hold in that anger (I tend to be this person) and they never let it out until something very small and tiny has happened and then it is turns into World War III? Holding that anger inside of you and not letting it out in small ammounts creates this well of anger that we usually let out in one inappropriate gesture.

What about holding in sadness? If we hang on to sadness we tend to cover it up with happiness. But then that moment comes when the straw breaks the camels back (and usually it is something tiny) and we just let it all out in one fell swoop, and it takes us by storm, and we delve into a depression.

I think it's funny that of these four emotions sadness and anger are similar, and happiness and fear tend to be similar.

Why is that? Well, happiness and fear are emotions where if we live in them there is no way to grow. We don't become more complex or more intelligent people when we are feeling happy, if we are not careful we can become complacent. However, with fear, if all of you feel is fear then you never venture out into the world,and if you never venture you can't grow. The way you learn from fear is fighting to get out of it, after all that is how you begin to realize how strong you can actually be. On the same token, the way to overcome happiness is to not use it as a cover up for sadness and anger, you have to allow yourself to feel those two emotions.

With sadness and anger, they are similar because growth happens while you are in the midst of feeling those emotions. With sadness we learn as we are crying and feeling that pain in our heart. With anger, we are realize what we are willing to take while expressing ourselves through our voice, through our words, through our actions of dealing with that anger.

I think sometimes, the answer that seems the most practical isn't always the most obvious. We always want to cover the "bad" emotions with happiness. However, by not allowing ourselves to show that anger, sadness, or fear we are doing emotional damage to ourselves.

To go back to the four food groups: If we ignore fruit, we rob ourselves of the sugar our bodies need. If we ignore vegetables, we rob ourselves of the iron that our body needs. If we ignore meat, we rob ourselves of the protein that our body needs. If we ignore dairy, we rob ourselves of the calcium that our body needs.

When it comes to emotions we cannot deny ourselves a single one. They are vital to our emotional health. However, if those four emotions equal the four food groups then love is the chart that holds them all together.

I guess that must mean a Pt. II :)

Foundations

I was talking on facebook earlier today with a former journalism teacher of mine. I don't know how the subject was broached (with me, I rarely know how a subject comes up at all.) However, we began talking about blessings and how we tend to take them for granted a lot of the time. The word blessings has a religious conotation to it, but by blessings, I just mean the really heart enriching things in life.

I think what is going on in the world is that we are becoming a society obsessed with "things." We all want to spend money on things, and possess them either to say we have them or to show off. We don't really stop and think about the "THINGS" we have that actually do matter; the effects that make life truly enjoyable from its core.

You know when you build a house, you can't erect it if you don't have the foundation to do so; it would collapse in on itself. I have concluded that understanding our "blessings" follows the same concept. I think that people nowadays are building the house, but they have no idea what is holding the structure up.

We purchase the Wii (I want one), the ipod, or some new gadget that has just been created to make our life "so much simpler". (And to be honest, I don't know what I would do without the ipod). We are buying all these fancy "blessings" that are fashioning the house. However, the house is in danger of falling unless we understand the simple structure underneath that makes all those things worthwhile.

Things as simple as family; the ability to just talk and conversate and play around with your loved ones. Things as simple as time; the right to take that second or two and just appreciate the silence. Things as simple as breathing; how often do we underestimate the power of our chest moving in and out? Things as simple as thinking; the ability to dwell on ideas and then getting to express those ideas out loud.

The dilemma is complex, but the answer is simple. (Funny how often that is the case, isn't it.) I have seen the foundation of a house first hand (my father is a brick layer) and let me tell you something, there is nothing extraordinary about it. It is a bunch of blocks that are mudded together on a concrete slab. It is a very simplistic look with not much to it. However, what that "simplistic" foundation is capable of is impressive. That elementary foundation can hold up a house that shelters a family of four and keeps them safe from violent thunderstorms and tornadoes or from the churning wind that rattles windows, it provides a safe place from the outside world and burglers and people who want to destroy a person's self-pride. The list can go on and on with what a foundation can do, but without it, the house will fall and we will be left without all of those things, including the simple ones, becuase we never took the time to build that foundation.

So maybe we should all do that, sit down and make a list of the things that we truly own in life: the family, the time, the friends, the breath, etc. Nothing should involve money (that is what you use to make the house flashy). On that list place the things that make us feel good at our core. Those things in life that prove that if you took away every single possession away, life would still be worth living. It would still be worth it to get up every day, because we know the materials that make up our foundation.

Keep this in mind, when you see a tornado or a hurricane ravage a home and tear it up from the floor to the roof, what is the one thing that never blows away? For those of you who can't figure it out....it would be the foundation. Chew on that thought for a while.