There’s something I need to get off my chest. I’m high. Ecstatic. High on life. Two weeks ago new life came into my life. A dear friend then became a father for the first time and since then I have been lost on a gigantic pink cloud. I have no idea what’s happening to me.
Now it is not the first time that loved ones and friends have had children. So the pride, the joy, the curiosity, the delight are all no stranger to me. But this time it’s different. Suddenly I am overcome by an inexplicable urge to care for my childhood friend. So I bring soup and lasagna. And when I see him, I am gentler in my dealings. As if a crude joke would be the fatal straw that breaks the camel’s back in terms of sleep deprivation. “Careful, it has to last a lifetime,” my conscience whispers.
A long life together
We met as teenagers. It was a summer night in August. We grew up from mischievous partygoers into each other’s know-it-all kindred spirits. Over nightly portions of fries, we argued like brother and sister about what the world should look like. Sometimes he went out. Then I agree. And we always came back as if nothing had changed.
For the first time in years, the world seems to stand still. My heart is weak, my head is full. His children – twins – color my thoughts. They populate my dreams, while they can’t do anything yet. Every photo, every video is like a dopamine shot. With the arrival of the stork, a purifying gentleness suddenly descended on me. As if my worries no longer matter.
This feeling is completely unknown to me and I find it very confusing. The neurotic in me wants to understand. That’s a bit disappointing. Enough literature describing how babies change friendships. How newborns dictate the rhythm of encounters with their naps and breastfeeding. So much has been said and written about the sadness and uncertainty of childless friends in a baby boom. About the mourning for what has passed. About the fear of what is to come.
But nothing about the almost manic excitement that comes from bystanders. Not a word about the intense satisfaction. Curious about an explanation, I contact sociologists, neurologists and psychologists. They all say something about empathy, selflessness, dopamine and oxytocin. One person suggests that I need to dig into my soul to understand what these emotions mean to myself.
Experience or understand?
Does it have to do with proximity? The new parents literally live around my corner. Does this event confront me with my own desire to have children? What kind of parent do I want to be? Do I even want children? Yes. Do I want them now? Absolutely not. Or is all this an emotional masquerade for an existential fear? Now that I see that friend in his new role, I might discover something new about myself too. Maybe I’m projecting unspoken desires onto them. And am I allowed to feel all this? I. Know. It. Not.
Because I’m nowhere after three days and dozens of phone calls, I call Martha Claeys (University of Antwerp), who conducted research into the philosophy of emotions. “Do you want to experience it or do you want to understand it,” she asks. In my search for the reason behind the seemingly unreasonable, a question arises: why do I think about this so much? Where does the urge to explain emotions come from? “We distrust what we do not understand,” says Claeys. Although she does not believe that emotions are completely inexplicable. “In our society, emotions are easily dismissed as irrational and unreliable. As if our supposedly mysterious emotional world has to lose out to logical reason. While most emotions are really not that incomprehensible. There must be a reason why you feel what you feel. But you may not know that reason yet. In this sense, emotional experiences can be a starting point for reflection about yourself and your worldview.”
On Claeys’s advice, I dive into Uses of the erotic. In that essay, Audre Lorde argues for embracing the erotic within ourselves. The eroticism that Lorde is talking about is the emotionally incomprehensible. Love in all its guises, after the Greek god Eros. Lorde describes it as “the continuum between our self-consciousness and the chaos of our most powerful emotions.” It’s the kind of emotional knowledge that forces us to put all facets of our lives into perspective. With our Western tendency to ignore what we do not understand, we are failing ourselves, Lorde believes. “If we refuse to be aware of what we are feeling in every moment … we miss out on a big part of that experience.”
Some things are greater than language and reason. If we lack words to describe the inner, perhaps that is a signal to cherish it eagerly. My high is probably temporary, but as long as it lasts, I will remain undisturbed on that pink cloud.
You can read more thoughts about life on the blog Uit het hart
