what we are vs what we have

[kareina]

In a conversation with a friend yesterday he chose a word to describe me, and I laughed, admitted that it might apply, but then commented that I didn’t think that the word would have made the list of top ten words I’d come up with if someone asked me to choose some to describe myself. (No, I don’t remember what word he used, but it doesn’t really matter in terms of the direction I plan to take this rambling bit of text.) He promptly countered by asking what 10 words I would use to describe myself. Therefore, after admitting that I’d likely come up with a different set if asked on a different day, I proceeded to choose ten descriptive words (again, I don’t remember what they all were, but ‘intelligent’ and ‘neat-freak’ both made the list). He then promptly asked “but are you happy?”

That question stopped me in my tracks—yes, I am happy and generally known as such, but I never would have thought to include it in a list of ten words describing myself. Why not? Because I see descriptions as being about what a person *is*, and emotions as being something a person *has*. Sure, in English, we use the phrase “I am happy” (or sad, or any other emotion one can name), but when I think about it, emotions are (or can be) fleeting things. They are a measure of how one feels at this very moment in time—a sum of one’s reactions to the stimulus one is exposed to. Expose a person to lots of good things and they are more likely to be happy. Expose a person to all of their pet peeves in quick succession, and they are likely to be annoyed, if not downright angry. Many of us have the capacity to run a whole gamut of emotions over the course of a day (or an hour) as we react to different circumstances.

Including an emotion in a description of a person, be it myself, or my perception of another would be akin to including what colour clothes they are wearing. One’s clothing colour today is helpful information if you are scanning a crowd looking for them, but there is no guarantee that it will be the same from one day to the next, and so has no place in a general description. Even those of us whose wardrobes contain a very limited colour pallet (can you say black and navy blue are always a good thing?) still have clothing in different colours, even if it is just because the older items have faded while the newer items are still at full dye saturation. While it is true that, some people experience one emotion so much more often than others that it might make sense to include that one in a description of them, I think that even people suffering from a broken heart or clinical depression still have happy moments now and again, and even people who are generally happy still see moments when enough of their pet peeves have been demonstrated in their presence to feel a flash of annoyance.

So, there you go, now you know why I don’t list emotions when asked to describe myself. Now, had he asked for ten words about how I feel…

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Because I see descriptions as being about what a person *is*, and emotions as being something a person *has*. Sure, in English, we use the phrase “I am happy” (or sad, or any other emotion one can name), but when I think about it, emotions are (or can be) fleeting things.

Ah, perhaps you are, at heart, a LOL-cat! (to wit: "I has a happy")

[kareina.livejournal.com]

ok, you really did make me laugh loud enough to have been heard, were there any witnesses present...

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

You two always make me think. I really like that about both of you.

Now I'm thinking about what my own feelings are and think, "How strange, I'm always talking about how things need to be changed, and yet I'm not unhappy or dissatisfied with life in general. (Is this resignation?)

I've come to the point that I accept my individual situation, and yet am still filled with the desire to somehow help 'fix' and change the world in many ways for other people. Are the two feelings in conflict with one another?

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I don't see a conflict. Indeed, it is probably *far* easier to help effect changes/repairs in the world if you are doing so from a comfort with/acceptance of your own situation.

I think that might even be one of the tenants of Buddhism. I don't *know*, not having made a study of that belief system, but I think I've heard someone say something kind of like that about their beliefs at one point. Or I could be making it up.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Sure, moods vary all the time. There are people who are happy people, and some who are unhappy people, though, as overall patterns. It's like the difference between weather and climate. A bad mood is weather; pessimism is a climate. Dr. Seligman's book Learned Optimism is an invaluable and rigorously research-supported source of information on what makes people happy-as-a-climate.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I like that way of looking at it, and am reconsidering my previously unconscious decision to avoid emotions when describing myself, since my climate does tend to be on the happy/optimistic end of the spectrum. That book sounds interesting--I think I was born optimistic, but I've been trying to teach that... skill? to others for years, with varying degrees of success. I suspect that reading such a research-supported book would be helpful in my quest to encourage optimism in others.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it would! I highly encourage checking it out. Seligman is the psychologist who discovered learned helplessness decades ago (a condition in which animals, or people, stop trying because they have been conditioned to expect no results from their efforts, and which relates closely to pessimism), and more recently he has directed his attention to its positive counterpart, learned optimism, and how people can learn to be happy and successful.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Thanks for telling me about it, I did a quick search and found a page which gives a synopsis of the book, it does look very helpful.

[jupiterorbit.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with the "what I am" vs. "what I feel".

It is possible to be optimistic or hopeful overall - to tend to take the high road of assuming half glass full - and to not be precisely happy at some points in our lives. I don't see a disconnect with those two paradigms in the slightest, personally.

Consider a situation where an optimistic person comes back to a parking lot and finds that their car has been rear-ended by another driver; then consider this same situation confronted by a pessimistic person. Neither is going to be precisely "happy" at that moment in time, and with reason; nobody has to search out deep sources of "emotional problems" with such an event that has an obvious causality. But an optimistic person will deal with it much differently than a pessimistic person in the main.

I do not think of myself as either a happy or unhappy person, as you originally stated; I really felt like I'd had a horrible label hung on my by my ex-husband when he cited me as a "happy person", because that seemed to bring a whole lot of unwarranted and untrue assumptions along with it - like that I'd only like certain kinds of music, etc. I am made happy or unhappy by events that occur, and am likely to remain neither permanently. :-)

Thanks for bringing this up. I find myself wanting to say something like this a lot when a characterization of a particular person comes up in conversation.