Feeling the Feeling

A feeling is not just a come-and-go representation of what we think at the moment. A feeling is really a part of us that needs expression. Almost like the steam building up in a pressure cooker. There's a lot of it, and once it finds even the tiniest gap, the whistle goes off and the steam is let out in a huge burst. Okay, not huge, but you get what I mean. The resultant impact is a visual burst of steam, a squeaky whistle to go with and a bit of heat, and a pretty well cooked serving of dal or vegetable.

The same is with feelings, really. They come out in fits and starts after seeing an opportune time and there's so much too them that they fail to go unnoticed. They have some amount of impact or relativity with someone or the other who goes out to connect with them. Someone's looking at the various areas that the feeling exposes, and someone is looking at the product that the feeling creates. But to you, and solely to you, the feeling means something that is let out of your system. I bet even the pressure cooker looks forward to losing a bit of its steam.

Taking that forward, the reason we're actually okay with letting off this steam and are told not to bottle our feelings inside us is so that there is space for more! We have social and emotional experiences every moment, either conscious or unconscious. To keep it within us and not share what it meant to us or what feelings it arouses is to arrest its impact. Which is why we seek expression. Most of us do so by channelising it into a creative field. I write. and so do a lot of people. What we write is a literal expression of what we're thinking and what we're feeling.

Once the feeling escapes us, and I say escape because it really is trapped and has a lot of better things to do than sit around in a crevice of our mind, it ceases to live in us. It has found a happier place to be [just being polite here. I know how much some of us would rather just let it live inside, rent-free, if nothing else]. That doesn't of course mean that we won't feel something like that again. It means that the feeling we attached to it this time, will not come back for the next time. Its variants may always exist, but THAT feeling won't come back. Like the feeling when you eat chocolate after going on the longest crash diet ever! [3 days. true story.] Point is, that feeling has wandered off to connect with another individual, who would identify with the feeling and give it a new residence.

Now, I've had this experience, as have friends of mine, that they cannot connect with their written or expressed feelings like someone else can. If you read what I've written, full feeling intact, and you go through a wave of emotions and thoughts because of what I wrote, I may not be able to reconnect with my own written word. Something that came out of me. But that's because my mind has now given that space off to another set of feelings and doesn't feel the need to connect back with something that it housed for a long time before letting go. Trying to reverse time and re-feel the feeling is like trying to stuff the steam back into the pressure cooker. Trust me, it will not happen.

And so, at the end of this seemingly endless rant, I know for sure I've let out my feelings on feelings. Even though they may never come back to me, I know there's nothing to regret or want back here. I've felt it, harboured it, thought it through, been on a roller coaster with it, before finally saying good-bye. And I think we had a pretty good time, too. Its just that I don't think I can spend my life, or a large part of it, tied to one feeling just because it was mine at one point in time...

=D