Shared Experiences

Partial Solar Eclipse 8/21/2017

I usually ramble in my journal and only share my thoughts after I have them unraveled and expressed in a comprehensible way. But I have a feeling I am not going to succeed with this train of thought so will share things as is for now and maybe others can help me express my thoughts or point me towards similar thoughts.

Some of my least favorite things to hear from family and well-meaning friends:
"You don't understand because you don't look that way."
"You don't know what it's like unless you have kids."
"It's different because you are...."

Those comments frustrated me because I felt that I did understand whatever situation we were talking about regardless of my lack of personal experiences. I can sympathize with my sister's, or any woman's, struggle to juggle work, family, marriage, kids, and personal fulfillment without having to live her life. I can imagine what it must be like to worry about your child or feel helpless as you watch her struggle through life, without ever having my own child. My brush with hate and racism is minor (if there is such a thing as minor evil), but I believed I understood the anxiety, fear, and anger some of our neighbors feel as they go about their day.

I thought I could intellectualize feelings and emotions.

I was wrong.

I can imagine those emotions but it is not the same as actually feeling them. Oddly enough, it took yesterday's solar eclipse to remind me of that. I got all emotional seeing the moon slowly blocking the sun. I read about the eclipse. I saw pictures of them. I viewed time-lapsed videos of them. But none of that gave me the rush of awe and feelings of insignificance as actually seeing it myself through the filtered glasses.

I still believe I can understand something without having to experience it.

But perhaps my family and friends were not talking about understanding on an intellectual level, but on an experiential level. For emotions, such as fear, hate and love, cannot truly exist alone in thought experiments. They have to be lived. And the shared experiences with those around you are the cement that hold and solidify those feelings. Without those shared experiences, you are left with only what you imagined those feelings would be like --- without actually feeling those emotions.

Anyway, I don't really know where I was going with all this. Guess struggling to understand current events and how people can feel emotions that are so foreign to me sent me down this winding road. It was not an epiphany or anything. More like a reminder that life is meant to be experienced, not intellectualized.

But experiences can be so messy.
Thinking about life is so much safer than living it.
........ to be continued ......