Language
I am feeling a lot, to the point of overwhelm. The more I try to list and the more I try to feel the more that emotions wash over me and consume me.
And yet, despite feeling so much, I am also feeling so little.
It is as though there is a system overload deep within me. It is as though I have my foot flat to the pedal and the engine is revving to its limit, but the car is not moving. For all of the power and intent, it is getting stuck.
It is with some irony that I am struggling to put this into words, for what I think is the problem is that our languages fail us. They are simply not complete or complex enough to properly encompass and translate what our bodies are trying to tell us.
I often fail to be able to describe my feelings, and yet the outward view of that is that it means I am either disconnected from those feelings or that I do not have them in the way that others do, those others are able to better describe their happiness, sadness, or whatever it is that they’re able to put into words.
I would argue that the opposite is true. I can feel the emotions so strongly and so true that I simply cannot put into words what I am feeling.
Not because there is something wrong with me or even that I lack the emotional intelligence to do so - it’s because we do not have the language to properly describe what I’m feeling.
Words are not enough
How can you feel something as heavy and painful as sadness or grief and describe it with a word? Or even a phrase? It’s not through not feeling that we struggle, it is that those emotions are too complex to accurately put into words - words that we have created and put together.
Perhaps it is why poetry and songs are so fundamental to human experience. They attempt to do what we cannot - they attempt to describe the indescribable using words and sentences. Maybe some get close; but none ever reach the complete totality of what it is to feel something.
Of course, this is when describing our feelings to other people - but how is that any different to how we interpret and feel our own emotions?
How can my brain translate indescribable emotions if it can’t speak the same language?
If a dog, who cannot understand human languages, has a voice in his head speaking English that tried to describe the concept of “tomorrow”, would the dog have any clue of what was going on?
Overwhelm through lack of translation
There are often times when I know something, without being able to think it or put it into words. It’s probably not that rare - think of the times when you have been thinking of a word, that despite knowing exactly what you mean, you can’t find the word that translates that meaning. How many times have you been able to either visualise, or feel someone’s presence in your mind, yet been unable to remember their name?
Names are yet another powerful language metaphor to describe the point.
Your name, the combination of letters, is used to summarise everything that you are. Rather than describing you, or to attempt to put into words everything that you are, we simplify you and your entire existence into a couple of words.
One may argue that this is accurately summarises everything that one is and identifies said person in such a way that is fine. But how can that be enough?
Not Enough
It raises far too many questions, and some that unanswerable, and perhaps by even asking them I am either missing the point or overcomplicating things. But if we describe a person by simply using their name, it means that each person’s interpretation is dependent on what they know of that person.
Yes, one may argue that the name “John Smith” encompasses everything that John Smith is, but who John Smith is, depends on one’s knowledge and experience of John Smith. Is John Smith to you the person and their actions, but what of their hopes and dreams; and if so, how can you know what “John Smith” is without knowing everything about John Smith.
I digress.
Happiness is but a word that means the emotion of “happiness”. It is assigning a label to the emotion that we experience, and yet, whilst most of us would probably know what happiness feels like, we cannot be certain that it exactly the same for each of us. Neither can we say that happiness is the same every time we feel it. Of course, the label itself is helpful in communicating concepts, but to actually describe happiness using words is an entirely different challenge. And if we cannot describe it, how can we say that we understand it?
Signals and Intuition
Perhaps that unease that we feel about the world, is the world, the universe, our souls, something, telling us that things are wrong. We all have our intuition, and yet often we cannot put it into words until it has actually happened.
Clearly there is a processing issue - where we can know and feel something, and yet not know it. How can we simultaneously know something and yet know it? I can know milk is milk, but if someone asked me in Chinese whether I knew where the milk was, I wouldn’t know.
What are we missing out on?
It begs the question as to what are we therefore missing out on? What concepts are we yet to understand or comprehend because our language isn’t complete enough?
It is often said that when trying to think about one’s purpose in life, that people feel their purpose. This usually stems from firstly feeling that something isn’t aligned, but it then becomes a deep rooted feeling as to this is it but is impossible to put into words. We usually use a sentence or a phrase in attempt to give a framework or direction, but the real meaning or purpose is wrapped up in the feeling, and we can’t quite access it.
We know the purpose, but we can’t accurately process it because we have a language limitation.
Perhaps neurodivergent people, who are often seen as not being able to describe emotions as well as neurotypicals, are more aware in more in tune with these feelings and emotions and the native language from within, so that they are more aware of the translation errors and language limitations. Perhaps they are not so happy at placing complex and complicated emotions and concepts into narrow defined boxes (words) when they are much more.
I think that the world and the universe is often telling us stuff and we’re blissfully unaware. Perhaps those people more sensitive to those things around them are more attuned and listening. Perhaps we’re missing the translation that is required to actually understand what we’re all feeling.
It is in silence and meditation that we tend to understand things better and our thoughts and feelings become more clear. Maybe this exercise is stripping back our man made languages that limit us, and allow us to become more attuned with our native language from within.
Modern society has a way of bombarding us with noise. Maybe it is this bombardment of noise, energy, and information, that keeps us so misaligned from what we really feel and what we really should be doing. Is it a design of modern society to keep us overwhelmed and detached from the natural langauge of the world around us and the messages from our souls? I don’t know. That would be cynical. Although, I am cynical.
The end result is the same. The increasing overwhelm causes us to become further detached from our natural selves, and that serves only those who strive for oppression and order.
That is a talk for another day.
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