Misleading title. Before you get any further misled, let me tell you, I am not going to be proclaiming laws of emotion here. I don't think an Emotional Einstein exists. Well if she did, I guess I should say emotional Van Gogh in that case.
I have always spent quite some time trying to choose between the absolute and the intangible. My father is a doctor, but I think his first instinct was to be a botanist and I guess that is why poems about nature move him and he read them out loud to us, he would talk about nature and infinite wonders it offers and I guess imparted that spirit in me.
For years I have wondered, with my limited understanding to figure out why I am not able to fit myself in just any job, why am I torn between trying to be practical and trying to follow some irrational instinct to explore something vague. To me the answer now seems to be somewhat in how my father influenced me, or maybe how I am a little like him, but grew up in a different era. So while with every passing grade, the emphasis on Math and Science became stronger and my adolescent self grabbed to that identity and went on to prove myself, somewhere in childhood a love for poetry and a wonder for what life is, was planted and it stuck. Sudden financial independence, isolated urban life and the inability to express or even clearly understand feelings for men led me to throw myself into trying to find what it was that I could hope to salvage.
But the thought emotions, and understanding our emotional lives came to me in 2005, while still working at my first job. I remember standing at a balcony, distraught, lonely, confused, not knowing I was, just feeling a surge of emotions, feeling trapped in a mechanical system, feeling un-understood. All confused, having spent my late teen years trying hard to get into an engineering school, becoming a "smart engineer," those who are changing the world, the desire to become creative had begun to nudge its way in.
I remember, the thought first creeping in my head and I shuting it down, embarassed that I even thought of it. It was like an alien voice inside of me. Schizophrenic much?
I just have been thinking about emotions and our emotional needs as I have been reflecting and percolating more these days. Little more with ease these days, telling myself I am studying the laws of emotion :). Its tied to art, the indulging into it, why do we do it, good or bad. How frivolous it seems to me when I look from my hard-working parents' point of view. For my father, who came from a village, probably transcended hundreds of years of mechanisation and industrialisation of the world as he moved to a big city, then to taking care of us, from relying on water to cool magoes to buying a fridge and mom to be able to buy food processing gear to make and store ice cream. All those comforts weren't provided by artists. But, my dad used to write journals, journals full of poems and songs. I think it was he who instilled in us a love for poetry. He still narrates those verses to me, when I am home, though I think he has forgotten them more, nothing new added to it. Going through our school books and teaching us sometimes, kept his love for poetry and literature alive. But now, I think he just worries. I think, its religion and politics that occupy his thoughts, other than his weakening body, his farway children. So when I think of it, thinking of emotions is an indulgence. Following instincts is an indulgence. In a country where being able to afford the fruits of 21st century can only be a result of years of meticulous study or inheritance, maybe it is an indulgence. To a family of engineers, teachers, doctors, respectable job-holders, it is.
Yet here I am, feeling disconnected from that country that I grew up in, trying to connect, fearing I never will be, in a country where my days of stay dwindle, dependent on further bureaucratic pleas if I so desire. I don't try, will not try to extend my stay here, I fortunately have a family, in that region of the world where I can stay forever, because its the country where I was born. I do miss it, my mind wanders and thinks of the dusty summers there, my home town and the painting lessons I took there. My walks to the class through brick alleys, sometimes clean, sometimes splattered with buffalo dung. I think the buffaloes were occasionally around too, when not too hot. I always remember summer more than winter. Maybe because I visited my hometown only in summers as a child.
I realise I see it through a nostalgic lens when I think back of home, and all the cities I grew up in, studied in, worked in before I moved here but thats why I am here in this city, New York. I am here, not because I am avoiding familiarity, well yes I am. I am indulging in thinking about us as emotional beings. I am going to indulge and write anything, draw anything, act something, say something, watch people and if not contrived, have conversations and love someone, maybe love everyone. I think understanding emotions is about understanding everyone. Does that happen?
I have been anxious, angry, lonely, all things everyone has been, some a little more than others, some a little less but I remember those days, my first year of working and waking up every morning with a panic as if waking up everyday in a prison and not being sure if it was one, being so distressed that was the first time I reasoned why there were poets and artists in the world. If it wasn't for them, we could go on understnading and explaning this world in terms of mechanics. At that point I thought, they were all about just delving into emotions, and sobbing their hearts out, I guess I didnt realise, I was equating them to whiners. But there is more than that, I think. Chekhov said, "You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem."
I have always spent quite some time trying to choose between the absolute and the intangible. My father is a doctor, but I think his first instinct was to be a botanist and I guess that is why poems about nature move him and he read them out loud to us, he would talk about nature and infinite wonders it offers and I guess imparted that spirit in me.
For years I have wondered, with my limited understanding to figure out why I am not able to fit myself in just any job, why am I torn between trying to be practical and trying to follow some irrational instinct to explore something vague. To me the answer now seems to be somewhat in how my father influenced me, or maybe how I am a little like him, but grew up in a different era. So while with every passing grade, the emphasis on Math and Science became stronger and my adolescent self grabbed to that identity and went on to prove myself, somewhere in childhood a love for poetry and a wonder for what life is, was planted and it stuck. Sudden financial independence, isolated urban life and the inability to express or even clearly understand feelings for men led me to throw myself into trying to find what it was that I could hope to salvage.
But the thought emotions, and understanding our emotional lives came to me in 2005, while still working at my first job. I remember standing at a balcony, distraught, lonely, confused, not knowing I was, just feeling a surge of emotions, feeling trapped in a mechanical system, feeling un-understood. All confused, having spent my late teen years trying hard to get into an engineering school, becoming a "smart engineer," those who are changing the world, the desire to become creative had begun to nudge its way in.
I remember, the thought first creeping in my head and I shuting it down, embarassed that I even thought of it. It was like an alien voice inside of me. Schizophrenic much?
I just have been thinking about emotions and our emotional needs as I have been reflecting and percolating more these days. Little more with ease these days, telling myself I am studying the laws of emotion :). Its tied to art, the indulging into it, why do we do it, good or bad. How frivolous it seems to me when I look from my hard-working parents' point of view. For my father, who came from a village, probably transcended hundreds of years of mechanisation and industrialisation of the world as he moved to a big city, then to taking care of us, from relying on water to cool magoes to buying a fridge and mom to be able to buy food processing gear to make and store ice cream. All those comforts weren't provided by artists. But, my dad used to write journals, journals full of poems and songs. I think it was he who instilled in us a love for poetry. He still narrates those verses to me, when I am home, though I think he has forgotten them more, nothing new added to it. Going through our school books and teaching us sometimes, kept his love for poetry and literature alive. But now, I think he just worries. I think, its religion and politics that occupy his thoughts, other than his weakening body, his farway children. So when I think of it, thinking of emotions is an indulgence. Following instincts is an indulgence. In a country where being able to afford the fruits of 21st century can only be a result of years of meticulous study or inheritance, maybe it is an indulgence. To a family of engineers, teachers, doctors, respectable job-holders, it is.
Yet here I am, feeling disconnected from that country that I grew up in, trying to connect, fearing I never will be, in a country where my days of stay dwindle, dependent on further bureaucratic pleas if I so desire. I don't try, will not try to extend my stay here, I fortunately have a family, in that region of the world where I can stay forever, because its the country where I was born. I do miss it, my mind wanders and thinks of the dusty summers there, my home town and the painting lessons I took there. My walks to the class through brick alleys, sometimes clean, sometimes splattered with buffalo dung. I think the buffaloes were occasionally around too, when not too hot. I always remember summer more than winter. Maybe because I visited my hometown only in summers as a child.
I realise I see it through a nostalgic lens when I think back of home, and all the cities I grew up in, studied in, worked in before I moved here but thats why I am here in this city, New York. I am here, not because I am avoiding familiarity, well yes I am. I am indulging in thinking about us as emotional beings. I am going to indulge and write anything, draw anything, act something, say something, watch people and if not contrived, have conversations and love someone, maybe love everyone. I think understanding emotions is about understanding everyone. Does that happen?
I have been anxious, angry, lonely, all things everyone has been, some a little more than others, some a little less but I remember those days, my first year of working and waking up every morning with a panic as if waking up everyday in a prison and not being sure if it was one, being so distressed that was the first time I reasoned why there were poets and artists in the world. If it wasn't for them, we could go on understnading and explaning this world in terms of mechanics. At that point I thought, they were all about just delving into emotions, and sobbing their hearts out, I guess I didnt realise, I was equating them to whiners. But there is more than that, I think. Chekhov said, "You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem."
