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And yet I'm a fairly cold person in many ways. Many people are far more kind and sensitive than I am. I don't know how people go on and stay strong. Contrary to my own feelings, in my experience it seems like the elderly are generally more content than all other age groups, at least in the USA.
Sometimes being cold is a defense mechanism. It makes sense that if you are very sensitive and easily hurt, you close yourself off to people, feelings, and experiences.
I like how Mordant put it already with little to add.
Each experience leaves a mark-I'm addicted to learning, shaping, growing, maturing, and seeing things in different ways. I've met people who have never loved. I've met people who have constant love in their life. I personally enjoy a deep and enriching love with my husband who is also my best friend. Personally, I feel better off to have loved because I'm a hopeless romantic and a good love story always makes me warm and fuzzy, even if it's an illusion, it makes me happy.
Personally, I feel better off to have loved because I'm a hopeless romantic and a good love story always makes me warm and fuzzy, even if it's an illusion, it makes me happy.
*chuckle* -- As my late 2nd wife used to say, "I'll take a false sense of security if it's all I can get" :-)
and even when you love someone it may not always be mutually rewarding or consummated, and that's the difficult part of life. It's not like a Hollywood script. Sometimes loving someone and truly wanting what is best for them, does not include them in your life because everyone's paths, dreams and timelines do not meld. But this is where YOU make a conscious choice of how you react to it.
Do you learn from it?
Do you grow from it?
Do you still reach out to others - rather than recoiling in a self made shell of sorts?
What do you all think? How does one go on from strong emotional experiences? Do people generally just get more thick skinned, hardened with age? Do those who stay soft get beaten down, or keep their heads up?
When I was young I felt that it was probably worth it to go through life experiences that involved strong highs and lows emotionally. Even if it hurt, it was worth trying, as we only have a limited time on Earth to experience things.
But now, I'm not even 30 and yet I feel so weighed down emotionally. I'm significantly more emotional than I used to be. Close connections have made me more sensitive and softer. The experience of strong love, care, connections, etc can become so overpowering in a sad way when thinking about what has been lost, and will be lost. Because of this I find it difficult to go on carefree, open, excited to experience the world.
Thinking about those lost is so painful, even if I was lucky to have had experienced such souls and bonds in the first place.
And even when presently connected to other soul(s), with them showing reciprocating love, I find it hard. If they're suffering, I find it impossible to be happy. Thinking about their futures, if there is pain likely ahead for them, it's hard for me to think positively about my own future. Even if there are positives in the future, my fear and dispear about mortality is strong, because I don't want them to ever die, and I don't want to die and be without them. In the more solitary and youthful times of my past, I could feel a little more comfortable with mortality and motivated in a positive way to make the best of life.
Maybe part of it is just (somewhat unrelated) depression? I used to be happier and have better attitudes towards loss.
And yet I'm a fairly cold person in many ways. Many people are far more kind and sensitive than I am. I don't know how people go on and stay strong. Contrary to my own feelings, in my experience it seems like the elderly are generally more content than all other age groups, at least in the USA.
Am just curious to hear others opinions and personal views/feelings on these things.
When I read this post, this picture popped into my mind for the OP. I do not know if it's because the OP does not list gender in the profile or that the original statement did not include any gender identification terms. The description of love and feelings was shallow and at best and inanimate in all descriptive details. The nanny in the hand that rocks the cradle would be right up the OP's alley.
My parents had a very toxic marriage because they both were type A controlling narcisists who couldn't get along. Now days they even enjoy talking to each other
But I am not sure their marriage had any purpose. I don't think anything good came out of that relationship. Their children? The world could do without us. My parents' lives would have been easier without us. My mother ended up being a single mother with children and my father had to pay a very high amount for child support(50% and later 33% of his salary).
No I don't think it's always better.
Yes they get along but they get along just like we get along with friends. I don't think they learned crap or have fond memories of their marriage at all.
What do you all think? How does one go on from strong emotional experiences? Do people generally just get more thick skinned, hardened with age? Do those who stay soft get beaten down, or keep their heads up?
When I was young I felt that it was probably worth it to go through life experiences that involved strong highs and lows emotionally. Even if it hurt, it was worth trying, as we only have a limited time on Earth to experience things.
But now, I'm not even 30 and yet I feel so weighed down emotionally. I'm significantly more emotional than I used to be. Close connections have made me more sensitive and softer. The experience of strong love, care, connections, etc can become so overpowering in a sad way when thinking about what has been lost, and will be lost. Because of this I find it difficult to go on carefree, open, excited to experience the world.
Thinking about those lost is so painful, even if I was lucky to have had experienced such souls and bonds in the first place.
And even when presently connected to other soul(s), with them showing reciprocating love, I find it hard. If they're suffering, I find it impossible to be happy. Thinking about their futures, if there is pain likely ahead for them, it's hard for me to think positively about my own future. Even if there are positives in the future, my fear and dispear about mortality is strong, because I don't want them to ever die, and I don't want to die and be without them. In the more solitary and youthful times of my past, I could feel a little more comfortable with mortality and motivated in a positive way to make the best of life.
Maybe part of it is just (somewhat unrelated) depression? I used to be happier and have better attitudes towards loss.
And yet I'm a fairly cold person in many ways. Many people are far more kind and sensitive than I am. I don't know how people go on and stay strong. Contrary to my own feelings, in my experience it seems like the elderly are generally more content than all other age groups, at least in the USA.
Am just curious to hear others opinions and personal views/feelings on these things.
I like the topic. I am presently dealing with a sense of loss for which I can't understand how it has come about b/c I never actually had any interaction with the person for whom I'm grieving. It has made me become more unattached from this world (though definitely not completely), and I sometimes have very acute attacks of depression.
Personally, I feel that suffering and loss is God's way of tempering our attachments to the world (though I'm aware that there are probably those, even Christians, who don't see it that way and it is not what I'm on here to discuss).
In my own sense of loss, so to speak, though it definitely can't be termed loss because I've never had the person in the first place, I am definitely not as caught up in the world as I once was. I can't see the enticement of it that much, though there are things in which I still take a lot of pleasure (such as being in a nice warm cabin with a fire going on a cold winter night, or hiking in a beautiful, wooded and mountainous environment). Yet things which were once meaningful now seem very empty and gray (like going to the movies and the award shows I once enjoyed; it seems very blah now. Some movies surely can still be nice, but I can't take such delight in them as I once used to).
In my own opinion though, I wouldn't not want to have encountered this person; and I want so much to be able to encounter someone here, on earth right now, whom I can connect with and love even if they were to die before me.
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