Useless emotions

Emotions are good. They help open our hard shells, the armor we build up to defend ourselves from the World. During the Romantic Rebellion of a couple hundred years ago, it was thought that plays and other entertainment that created tears in the audience were the most healthy form of recreation. Tears, you see, were an acknowledgement that we were after all human, subject to the same animal instincts and weaknesses. And everyone talks about needing "a good cry". Even Aristotle claimed that the end result of producing tragic plays was katharsis, or a purgation of emotion.

If a smart cookie like Aristotle gets on the side of emotion, than who is a szhlub like me to argue?

Yet there are useless emotions that dirty up our lives, and sometimes cause us to end our lives unhappily and even desperately. I know, because I was one of les desperes subject to those useless emotions. And it made me opressively sad, old before my time, and physically ill.

One of the useless emotions is envy.

The other is regret.

Envy is difficult to deal with because our entire culture is based on it. Capitalism is founded in this emotion, and television advertising is a perfect example of envy at its worst. Dove soap has even instituted a program that untrains grade school-age girls from envying the body types we see so constantly on television, and encourages them to think of themselves as beautiful in their own way instead of wishing they were Miley or Paris some other "The Week's Blonde". Envy is what happens when we see someone's new car, house, fashion statement, significant other, or dog and determine that we MUST have one of those. Our current economic system encourages this kind of rapacious consumerism, and we follow blindly in the futile hope that THINGS will make us HAPPY. Got a problem? Get a new model! Consumerism fuels our system, and it's an inexhaustible supply of energy because as Stephen Wright says: "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

George Carlin's lovely rant about "stuff" sums up our hamster-in-a-treadmill mentality in a haiku: we need a house to keep our stuff safe from other people while we go out and get MORE STUFF.

Stuff won't make you happy, muffin.

Only YOU can make you happy. And maybe other people, but only if you love yourself first.

Remember that Buddha said, "the more possessions a man has, the more careworn he becomes." Thanks, Gautama.

And now, campers, we come to the most insidious emotion of all: regret. Henry II of England lived longer than most of his peers, conquered England and most of France, and ruled a kingdom as large as Alexander's or Napoleon's--and Henry died despairing, regretting his failures. For that matter, so did Alexander and Napoleon. Regret will kill you, bubba.

Now Regret and her sister emotion Shame have an essential place in our society, or any society--they keep us from doing sociopathic things that would really screw up the fabric of civilization. But mulling on regret, and feeding on it, is a real sickness. And it's useless at base, because the idea is to:

1. f*&^k up.
2. LEARN from it.
3. Don't do it again.
4. There is no 4.

We find regret most evident in personal relationships, and it can murder a present relationship because of missteps that happened in a past relationship.

We call these things "baggage", and some people bring an overnight case while others bring a big honkin' steamer trunk. It's insidious, because regret is a GOOD thing, but too much of it, an obsession with it, is poison. Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches are really yummy, but too many of them will cause you to explode. Ask Elvis.

So mess up by all means, learn from it, and move on. You'll be surprised now light you feel when you get rid of that baggage, and how relatively easy it is to travel when you travel light. That lightness is the lightness of your own heart.

Now Excuse me while I go and mow my back yard, because I wish I had a lush green lawn like my neighbor has, and I'd really regret it if I put it off till next week.