Ants seems to have a focus, a sense of connectedness and resilience I aspire to. I see hordes of them walking their path with purpose as a collective, sometimes carrying objects that appear too big for their small frames. Put your finger in their path and they walk around it, making a new path without fuss. And they always pause to interact with an ant coming from the opposite direction, as if exchanging important everyday intel. If we zoom out on a human life, as if looking down from an airplane, we are no different. We commute literally and figuratively on a path towards our goals alongside others. We encounter roadblocks, we bump into other humans and exchange information.
I don’t know if ants are able to go about their business without internal turbulence, but humans are a constant swirl of emotions. You can bet that our emotions will arise and fall every few minutes the way waves crash onshore repeatedly; especially when we interact with others or do work that matters to us. It’s in our cells to experience emotional waves in response to others and to create waves in them whether our interactions are deep or shallow. Our emotional waves create thoughts, which drive actions, which in turn drive more emotional waves…and on and on we go rippling. I’m assuming ants don’t go through this.
Sometimes these internal swells become all consuming and throw us off our path entirely. Our instinctive response to such moments is to either spew emotions or suppress them to live lives of control. In the latter option, we create barriers so the waves don’t crash so hard. But over time, we not only smother that difficult feeling, we block our ability to feel and express in general. The barriers we create to protect ourselves end up locking us in our psyche where unfelt and unexpressed parts of ourselves create layers of density. Suppressed emotions only have two avenues for release ― our reflexive reactions and unexpected bursts of emotion ― so under the right pressure, our dense emotional layers tend to blow up like volcanoes. This brings us down the long winding road back to option 1…the indiscriminate spewing of emotions.
There is a third option. Over the last few weeks, I’ve created a mental model that I’ve found productive in navigating my own raw emotions. I’ve started viewing quiet moments as spaces to metabolize life and emotion. To digest and move through whatever comes up in the course of my days. To see how like waves, my emotions churn up mud and sediment, making it hard to decipher reality. That the waves feel scary only when they’re tossing me around without my control. But when I sit on the shore and observe without judgment or involvement, they eventually subside. Rather than shutting the door to my difficult feelings like I used to, I now invite them in for a silent coffee when my house is quiet. At some point in this self-accompaniment process, it feels like I’m metabolizing life, learning, and growing with it. I also find important information contained in my hard emotions, that within the ache and fear is the intel for my next step. What’s more surprising is that once I gather that intel, the waves subside on their own and I start walking on the path again with more ease.
Until the next wave ofcourse. I still see myself flinging raw and unmetabolized emotions on others or into my own actions but now I have a framework to anchor back to.
“The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.” — Gabor Mate, physician and author specializing in treatment of addiction
