Dear First name / friend
When the sun is shining and the trees are verdant and the sky is blue it feels uncomfortable to be anything but happy. What more could we want? What more could we possibly need than the peace of a summer afternoon? So, when we feel sadness or anger or irritability, it feels surprising; uncomfortable; unsettling. What reason do we have to feel sad?
When I feel tearful, I always want to have a reason. I want to know it makes sense; I want to know that x caused y. When I feel irritable and then I get my period, I feel a sigh of relief. I like to look back, examine recent events and point a finger towards the culprit. It helps, I feel, to attribute today's tearfulness to a few late nights on the weekend, or to know that I feel tired today simply because yesterday was busy.
I think it's because our brains are trying to make sense of things - all the time: we love story. We build a narrative to help make sense of the world; this is normal. But sometimes, when we can't make the story make sense, it feels - certainly for me - worrying. Why do I feel like this? What reason do I have to feel sadness, or anger, annoyance or fatigue? I turn my attention to the past, searching for possible reasons. More often than not, I put it down to an accumulation of small things that could, not unreasonably, have contributed to my current emotional state. But what I want to discuss with you today is the danger in doing so, because, more often than not, I have rewritten a positive memory (visiting friends; an evening out) as something that has now caused me to feel tired and tearful: I use the late nights and long journeys to explain it. This is not wrong, of course, as those things probably did make me tired and therefore less able to emotionally regulate, but in telling myself this story, I have rewritten a positive experience as an overall negative one.
Perhaps you don't do this; perhaps you do. My point is this: there is always a reason we feel the way we feel, but it is not always conscious. Sometimes, something deep within our subconscious has been stirred and brought to the surface by some trigger unknown to us.
Mindful moment: We love stories; it's what human history is fundamentally based on. But sometimes in our eagerness to connect the dots, we are focussing too much on the past. Actually, that past night out may have made you tired, but didn't you enjoy it at the time? Wasn't the present experience a positive one? Personally, I feel the need to learn to accept my emotions for what they are, without the need to write the backstory. Do you? Are you able to accept negative emotions, even on a sunny day, without judgement or worry or despair? Without the need to connect the dots looking backwards? Are you able to be present with your current emotion and not resist it, or feel the need to explain it? By practising mindfulness about the present moment, we can limit our focus on the past.
