Crying

If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely. 

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Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely--but eventually be able to say, " All right, that was my moment of loneliness. I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I'm going to put loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them all.

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I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don't allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that's all.

I read that advice from Morrie (Tuesdays with Morrie) about 20 years ago.

I am an emotional creature (who isn't?) to begin with but emotions have engulfed me even more since Max left.

I have never had any shame or any sort of apprehension for crying (sans self-pity) but I never knew that I could cry spontaneously at any given moment - when I see his photos, when I kiss his ashes good morning, when I kiss his ashes good night, when I tell his stories to Neo,  when I visit his vet, at work,  while walking, while driving, in bed, in shower and now even as I type this.

But as Morrie had said - when we are in grief, a good cry is what we need. There is a reason why evolution has given us (and all other creatures on this planet) so many emotions. Each one serves multiple purposes.

There is no medicine in the world that can help us than our own tears when in emotional pain.  A good cry clears my mind. It helps me focus on what to do next. It helps me reflect on the beautiful moments in the past. And most importantly helps me let "it" flow in the present moment. Without this process, I cannot make any good judgments nor any decisions.

To put it bluntly - I feel lighter when I cry. It helps to float but not sink in pain. The process repeats. I don't for how long. The process will repeat as long as it takes since I am going to miss Max for eternity or till the end of my life whichever comes first.

Old news is that psychopaths to slaughterhouse workers lack or control their emotions but the new news is that if one controls their emotions (as the society preaches), one hasn't experienced nor used some of the fundamental tools that our body and mind has provided us with.

To add to  Pascal's quote:

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Plus, man's inability to emote freely and constructively which helps him go beyond himself and his family to aware of it's insignificance and how much suffering he causes because of that in the world. 

Reinhold Niebuhr said it more eloquently :

Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.

I felt liberated when I read neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's groundbreaking book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and his brilliant insight into "Somatic Marker Hypothesis":

What worries me is the acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their complex biological and sociocultural machinery. The best example of this attitude can be found in the attempt to explain bruised feelings or irrational behavior by appealing to surface social causes or the action of neurotransmitters, two explanations that pervade the social discourse as presented in the visual and printed media; and in the attempt to correct personal and social problems with medical and nonmedical drugs. It is precisely this lack of understanding of the nature of feelings and reason (one of the hallmarks of the "culture of complaint") that is cause for alarm.

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Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.

Today, it's been a month since Max passed away. I am not I without you, my love.