the unconscious cloud

The heart is a storage building of emotions. Each little unit marked and walled off from the other one. And thank god. I do not want how I feel about my teaching job colliding with how I feel about my eventual mortality. Knowing it is there is a good first step, even if you never deal with or look at it.

But some people are trailed by a ghost. They walk a few steps ahead of a floating mass of nerve endings that connect to them in ways even they don’t understand. There is an unconscious cloud over them, on good and bad days.

As a feeling person, I can sometimes sense that. Its like rain trying to fall but the weather isn’t right. Sometimes the cloud is full of love. Usually its filled with undressed experiences. A bible proverb I’ve never forgotten says “hope deferred makes the heart sick”.

In 2019, there is a lot of talk about trauma and therapy and I believe in and support that. I think the examined life is generally the good life. I think we all have a responsibility to move our experiences from the cloud to the storage building. I know that the ease of that depends on the severity, and its easier said than done. I’m not exempt. Two of my siblings have passed away. I know what its like to hear my mom scream in the house because she just discovered my sister’s not breathing. I know what thats like. And whoever you are reading this, I am certain you have carried in some way your own doom. Something that you have lived through.

I also know that that is part of my story, and in some way I don’t or maybe never will be able to grasp, it is at the core of some of my best attributes. Suffering either turns your empathy way up or way down. We get to choose.

Maybe we all have a cloud behind us, but its the job of a good person to not let the cloud overshadow the people we love or that love us. I work on this and I hope you do to.