I'm riding down to work on my motorcycle -- woke up early, feeling good, making the carpool lane before 10am for the first time in months. It's sunny out, a little damper in the air than I like, but really a beautiful day. Then traffic starts happening -- people go crazy.
A twinge of "Damn you for driving like that and making my life more difficult"
just a twinge. I like to be a fairly mellow person -- when I'm not really loving life, manic.
And *poof* I squashed the "emotion" that was the rage I felt. It was a tightening of the chest, and a couple other minor things. Not too difficult to remove when I thought about it. Not difficult at all.
Are emotions really that far removed from cognition? Remove the associated symptoms and the emotion disappears? I remember that smiling can make you happy -- often when I was deep in the hole I wouldn't let myself smile, because I didn't want to lose the despair. I think I may have figured that out, come to think of it. [I need to transcribe these rants, hmm.]
It wasn't the despair that I wanted to lose, and it wasn't directly the happiness (even false happiness) that I was afraid of. It was the falling from happiness to despair. If the things causing despair have not been removed, then one can be relatively assured that despair will be found once more. It's only a minor pain to remain in despair -- walls slam up, the senses numb, overloaded. But the pain the moment before those walls slam up....
:whee:
I'm rambling. I had a point. It's in there somewhere, in a couple places. Extrapolate at will. Or say something. I love comments! =)