How many people on the far side of
planet earth are you close friends with? In the age of the internet,
where conversation cares nothing for physical distance, how many
people do you know really well that have never been geographically
close to you?
What if Emotions are like Distance?
Our emotions, both big and small,
appear to define a part of our relationships with other people.
Namely, how close or far we feel from each of them.
How, after a social activity, do you
measure if you have spent good quality time with another person? It
is possible to do the same activity, and do it together, but not feel
that you have really "connected" with your friend?
I remember being one of many friends
who discovered that this was the case each time we went to see films
at the cinema. We were somehow surprised that 2 hours spent sitting
next to each other with no interaction between us failed to feel like
quality time spent together!
An answer to this was to spend time
together before or after the film. After the film was often quite
interesting, because the whole group of us had spent time watching a
story, and we all got to share our similar (or different) reflections
from the same thing. "It was so funny!" "I couldn't
work out the mystery," "The twist at the end was amazing!"
We got to share our thoughts and emotions about the story, and this
felt better than just watching the film itself.
When people are aware that they are
experiencing the same emotions as others, I think they feel that a
bond exists. It feels like there is a closeness.
The same thing happens after people
have survived a trial or tough situation together. "Team
building" activities even aim to deliberately present a faked
challenge to those taking part. This is pretty clever. A controlled
amount of confusion, frustration and then eventually joy at their
success will be shared by everyone in the activity, and thus they
will feel emotionally in the same place, and like they have bonded.
While studying Counslling Skills in my
degree, I learned that individuals who suffer from Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) can often feel emotionally closer to their
fellow survivors, who were previously strangers, than friends and
family who they have known for years. Cases of this have been noted
after both natural disasters and man-made ones.
This leads me on to the other end of
the spectrum that makes emotions resemble distance. People who
experience extreme emotions often feel alone. They say that no-one
understands what they are going through, or have gone through. I
think that one of the things they mean is that they think no-one
understands how they feel. No-one is emotionally in the same place.
So emotion only makes us feel close to
others if we believe that they are sharing the same emotion as
ourselves. If we believe that we are feeling weird and extreme
emotions, we can assume that no-one else could share this with us,
and so we feel detatched and somehow far away from others.
Can you picture how the population
would look if you marked people on a map not according to
geographical location, but according to emotional location? How many
people would be in the country Happy? What would the population of
Confused be? Which of your neighbours would live in Lonely? If these
are different places, how much of a traveller are you? How often have
you travelled to be with other people in this landscape?
Image source: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/myvalleylil/comment.html?entrynum=12
