If you happen to have read through my road to Tennessee posts, you’ll know my wife suffers from a rare disease. It’s been a long journey for us both, but more especially for and on her. There’s no way of truly understanding the emotional roller coaster she rides each day with her sickness. She tries explaining it, she tries expressing it, but I don’t think humans can really understand emotions unless we feel them for ourselves.
I wasn’t the first to think so. In history, all people of every culture recognized people just don’t understand emotion. We’ve learned to put emotion in art, music, and poems. Even those are imperfect mediums. Just the other day, my wife listened to a song I felt to be inspiring and wondered if I was depressed listening to it. Drawings can stir different feelings in people standing side by side. Poems that speak on one’s personal experience can suddenly hold a deeper meaning on the woes of the world.
We saw that was the case and invented a whole new art form to encapsulate all of those. In plays, we see passionate monologues surrounding the tragedy of romance accompanied by heartfelt music. Each character dressed in makeup to depict the struggle that led to the unfortunate ending. All arts pointed at a need for the audience to feel sadness. With three art forms pointing to sorrow, it’s almost harder not to feel the emotions they intend to evoke.
Think of all that takes. Clothes had to be made to keep people from falling out of the story. Make-up has to be “time period” accurate. The staged or scene has to feel like a whole world while being contained in a small box. Music has to be in tune with harmonies designed for the feeling of the scene. An actor must present his monolgue without hesitation, knowing his lines well enough to put his own emotions into each word. All this just to help an audience feel the emotions the writer wants them feel each moment of a play.
We wonder why people struggle to understand how we feel. Look at everything we do just to bring about emotions. It’s no wonder people can’t feel what we are feeling when we describe our struggles. People are selfish, not intentionally, naturally. We want to be compassionate with each other, but we can’t understand emotions we have not felt. I don’t know if there is a way to feel the emotions of someone else. I do know we can’t know someone else’s experience. Next time you see someone struggle, remember they are alone inside it, but they don’t have to be alone outside of it. We don’t have to understand the emotion to understand a person needs a person.
Jacob Gittins 