Strong Emotions

It is a Friday afternoon after thanksgiving. I went to work this morning, dabbled around. Found more questions than answers, then came back home for lunch, a cigarette and green tea. Then, I started to watch a mushy movie about puppy love between a young boy and girl. I describe it as puppy love just because of how I have come to think about emotions of that sort. The movie was a reasonably realistic portrayal of how two people in love feel.

All of this started me thinking about passion. In the recent past I have come to think of passion of any kind as a negative emotion in the sense that if your actions are all driven by logical thinking and analysis, how can passion have any meaning? The answer is that passion is indeed meaningless if you are completely “analyzed” for want of a better word. One can of course talk about passion in lots of different contexts. But given where this story started let us stick to passion in relationships. In this context, I mean the feelings that one has when one falls in love for the first time. Then, if you stayed with the person for sufficiently long time, inducing these feelings requires stronger and stronger stimuli as the years pass. But, as stated earlier, these should play no significant role in how the relationship works. Even then, most couples never give up these feelings and hence the need to keep stimulating them.

The positive thing about giving up the urge to stimulate these emotions is that the passion comes with some associated baggage that manifest themselves as jealousy or possessiveness or something else, but generically, dissatisfaction of some kind. And I am living proof that if you stop trying to stimulate the “passion” part of things, the baggage drops off as well. But then, once in a way, and these days as I am living alone for the first time in my life and seem to be slightly depressed or suffering from apathy due to some other reason, more than once in a way, you feel nostalgia for when you could feel the way you used to.