Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Emotion Ocean

A week ago this past Saturday, I texted this to a friend: “All I know is, this day is out to kill me — so gut-wrenchingly beautiful — all soft glitter on the water and leaves reluctantly turning peach and gold — not a day to be out in — not if you’re alone — give me a dark alley any time …” 

I was suffused with my old adversary, loneliness. It was clearly conspiring with Mother Nature to remind me just how much I missed my husband, how I yearned to share the magnificent melancholy of such a glorious afternoon. Of course, all kinds of days, all kinds of weather, can evoke nostalgia, but for me, it’s the autumn ones that are the most treacherous, mainly because they’re also utterly irresistible. 

So there I was, feeling lonely, ambushed by an emotion that was beginning to feel chronic.  I’ve written about loneliness a couple times, my own and also the oxymoronic “collective loneliness” that seems to have infected the whole world.  

Over the past few years, I’ve looked online and elsewhere, researching for the reasons for loneliness and best practices to alleviate it What, oh, what can we do? I was about to write a column entitled “Loneliness Redux,” but, in checking out the most recent research, I found it pretty the same: share with someone, seek support, affirm your value, take a risk, try something new, look for a community. All excellent suggestions, many of them helpful, but there is no fix for emotions. Whatever they are, whatever their purpose, however deeply they’ve been buried, for 10 minutes or 10 years (or longer), -they simply must and will be felt.

And that’s the thing — so common but so uncommonly powerful — and yet nobody knows quite what emotions are. A cause? An effect? For all the slavish attention being paid now to every aspect of the human species in a single-minded (some say suicidal) effort to artificially replicate it, this emotion thing is the mega-speed bump getting in the way.  

Not too long ago, some scientists dispatched with emotions by insisting they were merely the result of chemical reactions, but that explanation hardly seems sufficient in defining a characteristic so maddening, messy, and mysterious. In fact, so human. Forget what they are, scientist are presently embroiled in a chicken-and-egg  controversy about where they come from.

Indeed, what comes first — the thought or the feeling? In a 2019 article in Psychology Today, Dr. Robert Dawson maintains that, “Your instinct’s reaction to your environment causes arousal [feelings]; your instinct flavors the arousal into a multitude of feelings and [therefore] your feelings precede and cause thought. Feeling causes thought, not the other way around!  The expression of your thought (your awareness, your explanations, your logic, your rationalizations, your self-talk) is the product of less than 5 percent of brain activity and is most determined and controlled by your feelings … a change in thought can moderate the flavour of arousal only if it can change the automatic interpretation made by instinct. You need to know what your automatic interpretation is before you can begin to change it.”

But a recent article in an online edition of the magazine, Guideposts, begs to differ: “William James, the late 19th century Harvard psychologist who is regarded as the architect of modern behavioral science, was a pioneer in his idea that behavior can determine emotion as much as feelings can determine behavior. In other words, when we feel happy, we smile. What James added to the conversation is the notion that when we smile, we feel happy … for those of us who endeavor to walk a positive path through life, the idea could be posed as a question: Should we prioritize positive action over positive thinking? Few would argue the two are an either/or proposition. 

Thinking positively about our value in society, for example, certainly makes us more likely to take action to help those whose lives we can support. But what about this idea that our behaviors can dictate our emotions? Decades of scientific studies have connected the two, creating a body of research that supports the idea that if we “act as if,” a positive, healthy emotional life will follow.

Walt Whitman said this of himself, “I contain multitudes!” As humans, so do we all, as well as unplumbed oceans of emotion which make us, so far, anyway, inimitably human. This little mini-deep dive has left me still occasionally lonely but reassured, somehow, that this depth of feeling is shared by all of us on the planet, and therefore is what binds our species together — that doesn’t sound so lonely Not to mention that I won’t be having to stop any time soon to ponder, “What would AI feel?”