Melankolia

Coming back to a place where you hold many memories can spark that strange feeling inside your head. Many memories flash one by one and then burst as if they just want to be acknowledged. It’s almost like when we were in school, then our teacher would call us one by one to survey our attendance. It’s just like that. These memories seem to popped just to make sure that they want to be recognized as part of our past. At some point, you can’t help but to think how far you’ve grown apart and yet it feels like you want to cling into those memories.

I remember being happy back then, but also tired and confused. I’m not particularly grateful for those experiences as if I was graduating from something horrible to something better. In my old life, I was proud yet I hate myself sometimes. But that also happens even until now. So really, it’s not it.

But I also don’t think that it means if I don’t grow into a better person. I guess, I came to a point where I realized that life is just like that. You might feel that there are so many things you haven’t experienced from this world, but really, it’s just the same cycle with different circumstances. At some point, you might feel that you have to struggle, and then it turns into sadness, but then you’ll find something else that make you feel happy and lastly, you’ll come back again being just a normal “you”.

“You”, who don’t feel particulary happy or sad. The default state of “you”, that doesn’t really bother if the world turns upside down. It’s “you”, who don’t feel particularly excited but also not in a state of any pain. It’s just the everyday “you” that you present to the world.

But what happens when that everyday “you” turn into something else? It’s not boredom nor resentment. It’s just a mild disdain. Just like when you come across a coin when you walk. You know that the coin can be useful if you pick it up. But you may think that you have enough money in your pocket already so you really don’t know if you should pick up the coin or not. You don’t particularly hate the coin. You may even feel lucky that you find it. But you don’t know if you want the coin or not.

Maybe after all, the world does offer something more than happy or sad. Language has shaped our feeling into different categories. But our emotion is very broad. When it’s not happy, it’s not always sad. When it’s not sadness, it’s not always excitement.

But at the same time, I don’t find myself agree to the notion that our feelings are like a spectrum. Because it means that we polirized our emotions between two extreme states. I feel like, emotion has more dimention than two extreme states. But the dynamic is much more subtle in a way that we don’t always realize if our state of feeling is moving.

My state of melankolia helped me to realized that memories are mere vehicle for our feelings. As human, it’s not memories that we’re after. We crave the feeling when we sought for memories.

Growing up, I come to realized that our ability to deal with our feeling is probably the most important survival skill. We can survive just fine if we can embrace whatever feeling come in our way.

Anger and sorrow look ugly as an emotion because we label it that way based on our experience with it in the past. I’m not saying that they’re not painful if we can make ourselves believe in that. But pain doesn’t have to be ugly if we don’t label it that way. I’m also not saying that we should enjoy our pain. Maybe laugh at it once in a while, but advocating pain as something to enjoy or celebrate doesn’t sit well to me too. I just think that we can enjoy life more if we can embrace whatever emotions we feel at the moment and see them simply as part of our experience as a living being.

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash