The time has come, the blogger said, to name this other things

Yes, it’s true, I am no longer going to be naming my blogs by their number. Partly because I want to be able to talk about other things but also because constantly coming up with number puns gets on my nerves.

I know it’s harsh of me not to let my blog get into double figures. It never got to drink, drive or even vote and worst of all it never got to have sex, but I think it will be happy being named other things, as it isn’t, let’s face it, that hard to please a personified blog.

In fact I would go as far to say it’s very easy to please something that doesn’t really have emotions, other than the emotions you give it. I think it would quite nice if life was like that. If we could wake up in the morning and decide to feel X, Y and Z, and not have to worry about the emotions such as L or S (points for guessing what they stand for). Unfortunately, life isn’t like that. We can’t switch our emotions on and off, and those who claim to be able to are just kidding themselves (or lying).

Then again, there is the theory that without sadness there is no happiness, without hate there is no love. I definitely buy into this school of thought. That isn’t to say you have to hate someone before you can love someone else, but it is true that those who have never been truly sad, can never be truly happy.

There is no way to measure emotion, we can’t express it in it’s pure form. We can attempt it with words, or music or art, but really, the emotion perceived through that is the emotion of the reader/listener/viewer, and not the emotion of the artist. In my opinion it is impossible to have two people to feel the same way about one thing. No matter how close we may think we are to feeling the same as someone else, we are unable to truly do so. This is, in my opinion, due to us constructing our interpretations of life, and therefore the emotions we feel about certain subjects, on our previous experiences. For example, if someone has never experienced death (as in bereavement rather than actually dying) then they aren’t affected by it, most children don’t think about death because they have never had any exposure to it. On the other hand, someone who has had a lot of experience of death will think about it a lot, and is likely to attach powerful emotions to subjects, that some people would consider to be very neutral.

This is the problem with emotions, we cannot control them. People try, and often fail, to do so, and often this leads to further problems. What is often the best thing to do, although somewhat counter-intuitive, is to allow the emotions to affect us in any way they want to (yes I am treating emotions like they have thoughts, as it is often the case that they appear to) and then, once we have allowed them to do this, we can move on with our lives.

I will finish by mentioning one of my favourite words; cathartic. I like it, not just because it’s one of those essay buzzwords that makes you feel smart, but because cathartic processes are very useful. It refers to the process of cleansing or purging ones emotions, and was originally used by Aristotle in his definition of Tragedy. The best way to describe it, is the feeling you get after crying, the process of crying is a cathartic one, that releases the emotions you have been harbouring. It is often the case that we bottle up our emotions and need something to spark them off, we then overflow with emotion, and normally end up crying, or shouting, or even laughing, but, no matter how bad it may seam that we have done those things, it is good that we have released the emotions we have been keeping locked away.

I know I have spoken (well typed) for quite a while, on, what some of you probably consider, a frivolous subject. However, I would ask you to  just have a think about the way you handle your own emotions, and whether you could benefit from handling them differently. I made a promise to someone today that I would stop talking about nothing in my blog, and talk about ‘stuff’, and I am happy that this blog entry definitely counts as ‘stuff’. Thank you for reading what was quite a long blog entry, and, as always, comments are very, very welcome.