This is how it feels
by Bob on May 2, 2008
"This is How It Feels" was a particularly brilliant song by a band called The Inspiral Carpets in 1990. My friend Jane in London, a presenter at the BBC (now in Australia with a TV show), introduced me to them in 2005, a bit late but that's okay. I have too many bands and songs in my head after many decades of being a musician, playing all the time. But this particular song was special. It rang true about life and the musical tune and instrumentation was brilliant.
The refrain in the song caught me emotionally:
"This is how it is to feel lonely/This is how it is to feel small/This is how it is when your word means nothing at all".
Wow. That was an amazingly powerful lyrical refrain. It touched me deeply. And, of course, in classical "misheard lyrics" fashion, with great thanks and kudos to Dr. Freud, I heard the last line as:
"This is how it is when your WORLD means nothing at all".
Nihilism. Emotional deflation. Anhedonia. Life. The Human Condition.
So we move onto important corollaries: what does anger, love, hatred, forgiving and forgetting mean in the emotional mix of life ?
As far as I'm concerned, bitterness is a dead end. And so is hatred. It was written by wise scholars that hatred kills the hater, not the person being hated. I'd agree. It takes as much active energy to hate as it does to love, and it's as intense. Apathy is subtle hatred, paradoxically. So, we dismiss hatred and love as the same coin, no distinction except a smile or a frown. Bitterness as a side issue is a wasteland, almost as poetically as T.S. Eliot wrote in his great poem. Bitterness is a waste of precious emotion and time. But it's so human.
But if we move on to forgiving and forgetting, we are in a new territory. That's moving on and letting go. Actually, it's not really letting go, but a bit of an emotional fake-out on that. It's morphing the pain into something closer to acceptance of the Human Condition and closer back to love which was likely felt before we had to forgive for our own benefit. As hating kills the hater, forgiving ameliorates and blesses the forgiver.
And you can forgive without re-engaging the person you're forgiving, for it's a process of the heart and soul, not of the parking meter. Bob Dylan did warn us in his song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to watch our parking meters. We should know when to move on, get in the car, and out of the parking space or we'll either suffer a summons or parking ticket or spend the rest of our lives in that parking lot not moving at all in our metaphorical automobile.
So, forgiving is critical. It's do-able. It's a process.
As far as the so called "forgetting" part of the rhyme "forgive and forget" that's not as easy. Our human consciousness is a sponge of remembering. I'm not even sure we can erase what has happened, if we even believe that time and life are linear, which according to Dr. C.G. Jung in his Synchronicity might not be the case. We might remember everything forever, even in our subconscious, if we care to define internal boundaries.
So the process of forgetting might not be possible. Sure, we forget easy things for practical reasons. The hard emotional life items we won't forget. Even if we don't think of them consciously (if you really insist on the conscious/subconscious split which I am not sure is reasonable), we will remember them in a Dali-esque type way in our dreams.
Every deeply thinking psychologist has thought that dreams are important. They tell us something very important. Perhaps things about our feeling and our selves which we can't bear to think about consciously. Central Asian and South American shamans know this process all too well.
So, we see that hating and bitterness are bad lifestyles. Loving is good. Forgiving is critical and forgetting is great if we can do it, but it's likely not quite possible. So we forgive, remember but morph the bad into good now that we forgave. It's for everyone's benefit.
It's written in every holy book and wise writing of the sages of all cultures.
Now, comes the simple task of practicing it. As Nietzsche said: Human, all too human.