Emotions

It’s not easy to define emotions.

No, really, it’s not… Try to define an emotion yourself.

Is it a feeling? Nope, I don’t think so – you feel an emotion, so they are connected, but it’s not the same thing.

This “feeling of an emotion” causes often your mood to change, as well as your physical state of your body. You react, mentally or physically because of an emotion, or by an emotion. This means that your perception of things is directly influencing your emotional state and reaction on various events, and perception is derived directly from your deepest beliefs.

So, I suppose it would be safe to say that emotions are our responses to the world around us? And then a feeling is a response to an emotion?

If so – is it safe to say that it is a psychological thing? I mean, many scientists are trying to prove that emotions are biological in its core nature, or at least biologically driven responses to a psychologically perceived stimulus (wow, I think I just confused myself!)

And how do we measure it? Have you ever thought about how EQ (emotional intelligence) is measured?

Hmmm

I also read somewhere that emotions “move us”, and based on my experience, I couldn’t agree more. But this is what puzzles me so hard. It’s an experience and undoubtly true, but why is it so easy to understand it and so hard to explain it?

Why am I even trying to understand it?

Well, thing is that I’m a very curious guy and since I got into people development for some time already, I got interested deeply into the topic as it affects my every day job (and my IT/geek background doesn’t allow me to just accept things as they are).

So, many things have happened and are happening lately in my life, and I usually cope well with different events and “swallow” them on the

way… but this time I caught myself reflecting and being overwhelmed with not just a huge number of, but also very strong emotions coming from everywhere and nowhere, depending on the way you look at it. And I started thinking how people, no matter how similar they are, still react differently on the same stimulus, and how this reaction defines where we are coming from.

Lemme try to explain by listing some of things I reacted upon (no particular order):

– Prom night 10 years reunion, or better a Prom night after 10 years, cause my high-school didn’t have a prom night because of the NATO bombing in `99 and because 2 of our classmates were killed in a terrorist attack couple of months earlier. So, we gathered after 10 years, now as refugees and displaced persons, to reconnect, to celebrate life and friendship and remember our late friends.
– my beloved coming back home after a year in Paris
– Partizan, my favorite sports club, winning trophies in almost all sports this year

I will stop here (and skip my professional life which is eventful too) as these 3 are more then enough to test you – I bet your emotions and feelings while reading them were going from “awww” to “why in the hell does he compares his beloved and Partizan”, or from “f…..g Partizan” to “disgustingly pathetic”.

What I am trying to say is that we are all using the same “set of emotions”, which proves that all people are the same, but based on our perception and previous experience, and most importantly our beliefs, different emotions, out of that set, pop up as consequences in different situations.

These emotions we usually don’t define and are not able to explain before they cause a reaction in a form of a feeling or a behavior.
However, in my moments of creativity, I think I see them as colors, and that is just for a moment, for a millisecond before they transform into a response. Sometimes it’s even a form, based on a previous and very subjective experience of course, but it is a form and it leads towards a reaction.

And now that I think of it, I believe that emotions are both biological and spiritual, or more likely the thing that connects those two.

I mean, how for god’s sake, could I otherwise explain all the colors bursting in front of my eyes during those 2 days of reunion, how comes that my blood boils every time I watch basketball matches of Partizan, or why my lips miracoulosly spread into a dumb smile every time I remember that She is coming back in 2 days? 🙂

(note: this text, like most of my texts, is written as a defragmentation process of my brain, which I do best while writing, so please bare with me and help out with comments and feedback)