It is very important for me to continue to feel this way.
At least, that's what I think, every single day of my life.
I visualize my feelings as a house that I walk into, one that it would be rude to leave before I've had a proper visit. Sadness is a comfortable cottage where I can see and be seen, a place secluded from the world but with the clearest view I could ever imagine. I settle into the window seat and accept whatever drink I'm offered. I stay so long that I forget I have lived anywhere else.
Eventually, though, I flit about to other places. Anger is a third-floor apartment right above the space that Guilt and Resentment share, a space of hard corners and no money for rugs so you cannot help but alert everyone to your presence through stamps and swears. Exhaustion rents out the basement suite and Loneliness has the top floor. You can get the key to the roof if you ask the super.
Contentment and Self-assurance always have a guestroom set up for me and bananas and coffee in the morning. They don't mind when I invite people over to sit on their wraparound front porch and put hours of use on their wooden porch swing with the comfortable creak. Their kitchen is huge, their dining room larger, and there is somehow always enough seating around the TV or the coffee table or anywhere you want to set up a game. I don't mind looking in the mirrors at their house. All the same, I'm always surprised to wake up there.
There are others. Excitement has a townhouse whose walls are covered with bright colors and books. Happiness has the most comfortable pillows. Worry has an entire lake house, complete with a dock where Fear can tether its boat. Resilience keeps a garden outback and grows herbs in her kitchen. Everyone has music playing.
I probably spend most of my time on the road between Sadness and Contentment, but wherever I go, I feel the need to take off my shoes and stay a while. This feeling, whatever it is, it's something real. It needs to be experienced, lived, not just visited or, worse, ignored.
But there are places we don't need to linger in life. We are predisposed to it I guess, but there are homes that we were only meant to pass through.
I'm finding that that's the trick. Don't eschew the company of your feelings, but be wary of taking up residence in any given place. Follow the hand-drawn map from Anger's building to Determination's house. Answer the phone when Excitement calls you up at Sadness'. Let Happiness take you by the hand, even if you can't stay long.
Because this thing that we're doing, this living, it takes every bit of us. Our outrage and our sorrow and our joy and our love and everything in between and beyond. Feel everything. Be wonderfully, delightfully human. And then carry on doing the good works set out before you.
