We are a refined creature as human beings.  We base our lives, our goals, and our achievements on emotions.  How we feel we should be, how we feel others should be, and how we look at ourselves through the eyes of others.  Yet do we truly want to define ourselves by what others perceive who we shall be?  Or are we caught up in what others may want, or how we feel others want us to be in order to be accepted.

I think within each individual there is a hidden agenda, a hidden desire to just break free and be ourselves, yet we fall victim to the social norms and acceptances of others.  We strive to reach out, master the desires of our goal, just to land hard and fast, and experience the quixotic then repeat this cycle to no avail.  Life is like a paradox, it does not exist because it contradicts what is expected.

We then build our walls to separate ourselves from what we must be and what we had hoped to become.  We become a masonry worker of our own creation.  We build a fortress that holds our soul in so that we cannot feel, cannot hurt, cannot experience.

On occasion we find a better brick mason that tempts us to lower the walls. We begin to feel, we begin to experience, just to discover that they were but a thief, an attempt to peek behind our walls at the foundation of the fortress, so as to obtain a better floor plan for the castle they choose to build for themselves, of which we shall be banned from viewing.

The best defense is building without emotion, so when we build it is stronger and a defense that cannot be conquered.  Walls so strong, we shall not surrender to our desires and suffer the toxicity of defeat.  Then build our aqueducts around our fortress, so the brick maker may in return drown the fallacies and deceits in our waters and we can move on, knowing we have let them through their struggle not to succumb to their watered fate, feel the pain so willingly they inflicted on us.

I compare this desire for acceptance and the desire for what we all want but are missing as the ultimate job search.  We look for what is missing. “The Job”, being the missing piece, that we feel will fulfill what we lack.  We “apply” for the job, we find we have been accepted for the position, and then we begin to start our “work”.  During this process we discover that this “job” came with a ”probationary clause”, that was undisclosed and our hiring a conditional circumstance for which at any time while the “employer” seeks a more suitable employee, we may be terminated at any time yet we are filling or suiting a person that pleases them and strings us along.  So why pray tell do we strive to be an “employee” that works fervently at something so insecure?  Because we are humans with desire, and that desire is toxic.

In our life, an existence when trying to avoid toxicity, we must always remember one plus one usually makes three, black and white is truly gray, and truly Forrest Gump was wrong.. “Life is NOT like a box of Chocolates, more like a jar of jalapeno’s and what you let yourself be vulnerable over today, may come back and burn your butt tomorrow”.  I am not sure where I heard that quote, or who wrote it, but I love it!

Toxic relationships have been something I have experienced often.  Blindly I seek out to find what appears to be a good relationship and find myself questioning my sanity, my ability to reason, and whether I am just plain ignorant or what.  It is so often like asking one’s self, “What the hell was I thinking”?  Then you meet Mr. Right.  The odd man out, and it becomes apparent they’re your perfect match.

We differed little when we first met.

We had our place, and in it life,

From gray to black,

From good to worse, and back.

And yet there was hope

For open eyes,

For life and light

A yearning from another land.

And we fell,

We did not fall into each others eyes

Nor into love,

But into life.

And in our eyes

The searching magic appeared,

As large as our souls,

With features just like yours and mine.

Our wishes now are greater

Than the world our arms embrace.

Our inner world is larger

Than the outer.

The yearning finds its center

In our eyes,

And there magic finds us

With such open hearts.

The order now is one life

Combined by three.  And what we are,

We are like no one else.

Loved in the most abundant way.

     The fairy tale does exist. I have experienced it in my lifetime.  Not all fairy tales end in disaster, for if they do end on the mortal level, they still do exist in the mind, heart and soul for eternity. To love and be in  love, unconditionally, is an experience of a lifetime.

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The most important ingredient we put into any emotionally based conquest is not what we say or what we do, but what we are.   In a society driven by self gratification and the desire for self pleasure, we lose sight of the more human aspect of emotion and replace it with the need for fulfilled lusts and pleasures of the moment without considering the emotional impact it portrays on the soul.

We know what the sense of feel is, but deny ourselves the ability to experience it and replace it with the physical effect. The shallowness of our existence becomes the prevalent driving force.  In this process, our words and our actions come from superficial humanity rather than from our own inner core, our character. In doing so we simply won’t be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective compatibility. Eventually others will sense that duplicity, when our true colors appear.

In emotion there are three categories: pure-emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up;  disposable-emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you; and silent-emotions, the ones that on the exterior portray to the other to be semi-disposable and denied, yet truly are pure, but fear of exposure remain hidden and pained.

We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good connection could form. We want everything in an instant to fill a momentary need, to be later replaced and not a vested aperture to the soul.  That takes time, commitment, and willingness to set aside the “this instant” desire for quick release, and forego the experience of emotions that are substantial and not disposable.

In concrete emotion, we find the ability to grow through setting aside shallowness, and holding on to the emotions evoked, and letting them create a refinement of what we feel.  Then our souls begin to grow.  Is the reason we deny ourselves the pleasure of pure raw emotion a reversion back to an extinct emotion in past experience?  The fear of actually feeling again, or is it the fear of future anticipations being hampered or clouded?  How do we as a society truly be honest with expression of raw and pure emotion when we truly have disposable emotion and left ourselves no true unbridled opportunity to feel deep within and experience?

Some of the biggest challenges in sharing raw emotions come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something at the moment, the “here and now”: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good right then, fill a momentary need, because they hold onto hopes for the better to come.

In reality, the only way a true future emotional connection will last is if you see your emotions as concrete in the present, and let the gratification desired be as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take, with the intent of not turning it off as easily when it becomes something no longer needed.

Shared, concrete emotions are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between partners. Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death, some grow to become the dance of a lifetime, with steps that leave imprints upon the heart and soul of one another, with movements so magic, the heart carries a tune heard by the ears of only one other.

To desire and seek out our emotions and lessen the insignificance,  we need to delve within and seek out personal and interpersonal effectiveness, which  means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self — with your paradigms, your character, and your motives.

Understanding and accepting that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others, is the first step of the wasting away of our shallowness that drives our shallow being. Making a futile attempt to put true character personality ahead of trampling the emotions of others, will cause us to try to improve relationships with others in return improving ourselves.

Lester Bangs once stated in 1978, “The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what will the quality of life be if the answer is no?”  What quality do we as self gratification driven humans have if we base no true emotion in what we do when we seek the gratification without lasting effects?  We lessen ourselves to the character of an inferior statured species of mammal, who seeks out their mate for the simple prospect of momentary coexistence or a state of concubine for a suited purpose, and move on.

Can we truly delineate the difference of emotions?  Is there a definitive line?  Have we drawn ourselves as a portrait so abstract that we do not know where our emotion does rest?  Have we tuned ourselves out to what we should be feeling and experiencing?  Where did we as a society forget the basic 5 senses:  the sense to feel comfort, affection, love; the sense to hear the warm heartbeat of calm surrender; to touch on another’s humanity and the soul of their existence; to taste the joy and the flavor of life and truly living; to see the beauty of the emotion we could inspire in another?

We get so frustrated we just want to tell the objects of our affections to just ‘hit the road’, to quit playing games with our hearts and emotions.  We want and need to tell them before we sink so deep into loving that we forget to continue living.  I have found this to be a repeated cycle in my life.  It’s like the roller coaster ride, that some sadistic operator is at the helm, and refuses to stop the ride long enough for me to get off and I have to jump and flee being injured along the way.

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