Issue 58: Emotion — Processing Grief with Ordinary People

We're devoting each newsletter to one of your primal powers. 

 

This week's power is Emotion.

 

Curious which area of human intelligence might help you the most? Take the diagnostic.

Dear First name / friend,

Certain works of art can help you process grief.

 

Ordinary People, both the book by Judith Guest and the movie by Robert Redford, is one example.

 

Here's the movie trailer if it's been awhile.

Like Hamlet before him, Conrad (played by 18-year old Timothy Hutton) is stuck in a plot that has stalled. After his brother's death, Conrad treads through a rinse-and-repeat cycle of school, swim practice, and therapy— all of which mean nothing to him now.

 

His friends' lives move forward, but like anyone grieving, Conrad is left waiting in vain for the world to right itself on his behalf. 

 

But it isn't just Conrad's situation that grieving viewers find familiar. It's what he does with that grief. Again, like Hamlet, Conrad refuses to grieve in the way others want. He asks questions when they prefer platitudes and he starts fights when they offer comfort. In this way, Conrad protects his brother from a world trying to reduce him to cliché: something “ordinary” and easy to move on from. 

 

It's this combination— a stopped clock and a character fighting for their loved one to be seen as special— that echoes the viewers' individual pain and helps them heal.

Why do we do this exercise? 

So you get better at identifying what you feel and why. 

 

So we have a reference library of literary works to help you alleviate hard feelings when they hit and to flourish by building up stores of positive emotions. 

You can learn more about the narrative technique that helps you process grief in chapter 8 of Wonderworks.

Missed an issue? They're available in our archive.

 

Next week, Commonsense.

 

In the meantime, we're so pleased that Primal Intelligence was included on the The Next Big Idea Club's list of 25 must-reads for August!