by Analyn Revilla

These days, the news reports that drivers are more aggressive on the roads and that there are higher accidents and fatalities on the road.  Some people are channeling their unbridled emotions with pressure on the gas pedal or taking unnecessary risks.  Today, while driving along Western south of Jefferson Boulevard, someone passed to my left, crossing onto the lane of the opposite traffic and swerved to make a right turn, crossing three lanes.  Bold and stupid to say the least.

During my drive, prior to being a witness to that, I was musing about the gamut of human emotions.  I thought, as an experiment, that I would start to take notes on the range of emotions I experience in a twenty-four hour period, and correlate those emotions with the thoughts that motivated the emotions.  Then, as an objective scientist, I would create a bar graph of the categories of thoughts-emotions, to visualize which bars tend to be higher than others.  This bar graph would be an indicator of my tendencies, and perhaps help me to manage my emotions better.

My emotions have been running high.  I shared with someone that, lately, I’ve been yelling a lot at the dogs.  My temperature gauge is running hot and I don’t like this trend.  Upon recognizing my rising emotional temperature, I reasoned that the dogs prefer to be near me, especially with the illegal fireworks exploding during the evenings and sometimes well into the late night.  Or they are looking for attention when they destroy the hose or bend the metal bars of the screen door.  Big sigh.

It’s interesting to me that what inspired the idea of taking an inventory of my thoughts and feelings by logging them was leafing through a book called “Classics of the Foreign Film”, by Parker Tyler, and published in 1962. Open a page and there, bared to the eyes of the soul are images of the human condition.  Every page is breaming with these images.  I think this compilation is better than National Geographic.  It is art made by artists about You and Me, Us and Them, Me and We, He and She.  It is the relationships put into cinematographic art form by  years, starting with 1919 thru 1961 from different countries (Germany, France, Italy, Poland, India, USSR, Japan and more).

I don’t quite understand how my mind made the connection of what I’ve been experiencing with my emotions to the catalogue of dramatic scenes in those pages.  Like a light switch, the light turned on and I recognized that I needed to step back in my own life and see it as a movie.  In doing that, I don’t identify so much as the doer but more of an experiencer of what’s happening at the moment. i.e. not to take it all so personally (in pill form).  Watch the images projected on the blank screen as passing moments.  The only thing permanent is the screen, me; while the experiences are ephemeral.  

This, all this, that’s been making our emotions run high and low, shall pass.