Human capacity

Today I have been reminded of how resilient we humans are. Terrible things can happen in our lives, things that we feel, at the time, remove all point to our lives. Yet we do usually carry on, some how getting past this awful time that we feel has blighted our lives. Real pain is not transitory, the agony and gripping horror leave their scars on us, but we do have the ability in time to put them in to perspective in the grand theme of life.

Loss and the accompanying grief are I believe our basest, darkest emotion, capable of leaving us with seemingly permanent emotional blots and holes in our lives. All losses great or small, a life, a love, a time in our lives are all capable of evoking these feelings and reminding us of those greater pains, seemingly minor things of a loss nature can refresh those deep feelings of mortal dread. Things that we would never consider as a loss, an imagined negative glance, a careless word, all reinforce our hard learned experiences and can plunge us back into those depths.

We call these dark emotions negative, implying that they are always only capable of bringing us pain, something that we can never escape from, something that we have to suffer with for the rest of our lives. Being "negative" or having "negative" thoughts is something that we must avoid at all costs, something that will only bring disaster into our lives, it will always bring us down to somewhere we don't want to be.

Why?

Evolution has given us this brain capable of feeling the darkest negative thoughts, but also capable of experiencing the brightest positive thoughts, so there must be a reason. Certainly the metaphors of darkest and lightest seem to direct us towards opposites, light and dark,  black and white, implying that there is something deeply different about them. In physics white is all the colours and black they are totally absent, they are the opposite ends of the spectrum, without them there would be no colours.

I believe emotions are the same, without the positive and negative feelings our lives would be colourless. We know that if you move from a dark room, sunlight seems so much brighter, even dazzling, and so it is with emotions. When we are in the depths of pain and grief, often seemingly positive things can be seemingly so intense that they blind us to their real joy. We become so accustomed to the gloom that things that could brighten our lives become confused and lose their positive impact, or even be perceived as just more pain. So often we can chose to live our lives in a safe comfortable greyness, the depth of which we feel we have no control over, missing the colours that the world outside our own world can bring to us.

We all have our dark places, they are personal and every ones darkest place is theirs. There is no competition, our darkest place is our darkest place. And similarly our own light is also personal. It is easy to live in the dark, I believe the ability to do it is an evolutionary essential, like pessimism it has a protective function, perhaps about saving us from some ancient dread. But it can become all too comfortable, so much so that it can prevent us from seeing the positives. We cannot expect to be able to move effortlessly from dark to light, we have to let ourselves become acclimatised, allowing ourselves to see brightening shades of grey and colours before finally being able to see our brightest place, we are not able to move seamlessly between our extremes.

I believe that we all need to be able to experience a full spectrum, a life needs dark to be able to really enjoy light, emotionally we are not colourblind whatever we might think .If we have never been truly sad how can be ever know what happiness is. They are the yin and yang of being human and like that are all part of the balance we need in our lives.

It is the hope and knowledge that we have all experienced our darkest and our lightest times that give us the hope that we can use to carry us through. I think it is this hope that gives us our resilience, that most human of capacities, millions of years in the making and one of the things that makes us stand out as a species.