I am happy, Are you? – excerpts from an elevated chat!

I am happy, I am sad, I am angry, I am jealous, I am this and I am that. It almost sounds like your identity is lost and you are no more than what you claim you are. It may be true, temporarily. But the truth may be far from what you can see and fathom.

I was sitting with some friends last night and having a discussion in a ecstatic state about various emotions etc etc. And one of the things that was brought out was the phrase – ” I am LOVE”. A wonderful phrase and an expression – it is. It sounds like a vessel that is full of water and suddenly, it “appears’ that the water has taken the shape of the vessel – the earthern pot. This is the state that I also relate to the various phrases that I have heard by fello martial artists, dancers, artists- something to the tune of the dancer and the dance are the same, the art and the artist merging and also a stat where the body and the movement seem the same. I love the very thought of this intimate merging of the action and the doer yet it has often taken me down the thinking aisles whether there is anything that exists like this or whether it is a SENSATION and a FEELING that is so overwhelming that the brain stops comprehending the difference between the doer and the action and the emotion from the person.

When someone says “I am happy” , what may be referred to is that the person is experiencing the emotion of happiness at THAT given point of time. Likewise for sadness, jealousy, anger or any other emotion. Here the emoiton and the person become two different entities. Yes, like i mentioned in the pre para that, the sensation can be overwhelming enough to not being able to differentiate. But the love or happiness that one person may feel can and is also felt by the other person sitting thousands of miles away. So is there an external emotive “database”, if I may be allowed to call it so, where the emotions stay. I call the universe, the database for the emotions and when I am opening myself to the emotion, i am filled with the emotion which has been triggered by an external stimuli – an activity, a person, an event etc etc. So, I could be completely sad or completely happy or whatever.

Another point that was brought up was that Love as an emotion has the ability to corrode and corrupt. Maybe, if the properties are changed. In the ideal sense, the benevolence of universe’s love is boundary-less and hence there is love in the first place. The water takes the shape of the vessel because it doesnt fight it. But if I put salt or baking soda or any other substance into the water or tamper with the molecular structure of the water, without making sure that the vessel changes its properties to adapt to changed water, there will be corrosion. If love is left the way it is, and honoured for what it is, maybe it may remain unmoved and uncorrosive. There are a lot of maybe’s because I dont know of any definitive ways of talking about emotions. if the universe is vast and boundary-less, atleast to the common man’s understanding, and emotions are about openness, then how can words – which are structures to depict A SPECIFIC meaning – hence with boundaries describe something so vast as an emotion as Love or any other.

So here I invite all of us – the illiterate amongst the literate class to enjoy this handicap of words! 😉

#warriorsjourney, #syngrity

Vikram Badhwar, CEO, Syngrity, is a communications coach, an experiential educator, and an artist trying to bridge the gap between the creative and the analytical side of our brain. He consults individuals and teams in the space of learning & development to enable transformations at a personal, professional and organizational level.