An honset attempt to understand how emotions develop over time and how to use them.
There are many a times we have a very stong opinion on something/someone at one point of time only to discover it has changed after a while. The change though may not be instantaneous but very gradual and might just slip through our own consciousness. At this juncture, if you feel, "Oh! yes. I know what you are talking about", please read more....
Lets start from origin. Emotions!. I am not sure if I can define what are they but let's try to figure out what makes us develop emotions. We can see that emotions are our reactions (internal) for actions that we recieve from surroundings. Surroundings here refers to everyting other than us.
So emotions are result of actions which is nothing but experience we go through.
Let's take a sample here.
Imagine you see a motor biker dashing at 70 Kmph on the road and suddenly a ill fated dog finds itself between the tyre of the bike and the road (A horrible place to be in) but it barely manages to survive,the biker however skids and crashes heavily. pretty ghatly, isn't ? anyways, on seeing this, which direction you would be running? (please don't say the direction opposite to the accident spot). I believe the humans, the way we are would rush to save the biker, however there may be few die hard animal activists runnnig for the dog but quite frankly not many of us would give a shit about some dog on the road.
Now lets try to break this scene into individual actions and our internal reactions (i.e) emotions.
Action Emotion
1) Fast riding biker --- Anxiety/Fear/Contempt/NULL (You Ignore)
2) stray dog aimlessly
crossing --- Anxiety/Fear/Shock
3) Collision --- Shock/Gross/Sad
4) Crashed Biker --- Pity/Shock(still not out of it)
5) Crashed Dog --- Pity/Sorrow
You experience all of these within few seconds and after this we are most probably left with one of the above emotions for quite some time. The emotion which we might experience at the end of all may probably be Fear or Pity or Shock or maybe something else I completely missed.
Now what's important here is that we feel pity for both the biker and the dog, two same emotions but unquestionably we feel pitier towards the biker or we feel the biker is more valuable or whatever that we chose to help him first. So though we feel two similar emotions, one might be of stronger magnitude than others.
So extending it further. The net emotion we feel at the end of the actions is the resultant of individual emotions that comprises it.
Now lets study the effects of this emotion within us. On seeing this accident
we may,
1) resolve to drive slowly hence forth
2) give special respect for stray dogs on the road
3) wear helmet and so on,
but for how long?
We find ourselves doing this for a week or maybe a month and after that we are back to our normal ourselves. This is because of our tendency to forget past and move on. In some sense this is like decaying we have read in physics. The emotion decays over a period of time and we don't feel it after quite some time and the half life of the decay is directly propotional to the magnitude at which the action had impacted us. Something like if the biker is a random person you feel sad for few seconds but if it's your close friend you might feel sad for few days.
Next attribute of an emotion is that it gets out dated. For instance, whole of India loathed our cricket team over our uncermonious exit from 2007 world cup but when we became the best test playing nation in the world, we are suddenly happy and celebrate. So our emotions becomes invalid as and when we are updated with the current scenario
Now lets sum it up.
1) Emotions are internal reactions we feel at an action in our environment
2) This emotion sort of decays and the half-life is propotional to the impact the action has on us.
3) Over a period of time emotion gets out-dated.
What we just saw now is just a small piece of a cake.
Integrating this over a period of time, we can understand that the way we feel at any point of time is directly equivalent to the actions the surroundings exert on us and the emotions we felt in the past.
Now in my very humble opinion, I believe what differentiates people from one another is the emotions people experience on an action. If for instance, after seeing the earlier described accident, if someone says, "Wow! what an collision? but too bad, no fireworks:(", we call him a sadist where as if someone says "aaaw! too bad, I wish I was the biker", we call him a masochist.
So on seeing an action, if we can immediately execute what your emotion ask you to do before it decays, you can realise yourself better. More importantly the emotions we feel are the windows through which we understand this world and it's people. This world with all it's imperfections and obscenties are throwing more and more shit at us each day. We feel stressed, frustrated, angered by it's indifferent people and their disdainful activities. The big bully in the school had made us angry, the egoist teacher in our college had frustrated us. The money seeking traffic policeman had irritated us. The corrupt politician in no less sense had harassed us.
What did we do in return ? What did we do to our peers who had frustrated us in the worst way possible? Did we just stand still with our hands tied and hold ourselves until the explosive emotion decayed? When we saw an indifferent act on the road, did we just silently watch it and and wait till the residual emotions got out off you. Come on guys, It's time to take your emotions more seriously before the tide of forgetfulness chooses to erase it off from memory and therby you don't miss a chance to make this place a shade better than what it was before.
