What I Feel

I sometimes feel like I am too sensitive. I feel like everything, the world, the people in it, affect me too much. I feel sometimes that I am so swollen with emotion, with sorrow or joy or despair or hope, that I'm just going to bust and flood the world. I feel the bad ones more though. I feel a deep, overwhelming sense of sorrow at the thought of someone losing a loved one, of someone watching someone dear to them die, of someone who is hungry, of someone who is alone. Of someone who buries their child. Of someone who is so impoverished they cannot feed their family. I feel the pangs of suffering most severely. And it's not even my suffering, or any particular person that I know of. It's just suffering in general. I absorb so much of what is around me, it's like I'm hypersensitive or something. I feel EVERYTHING, and threefold. I watched an interview with a man in Louisiana today. He works at the emergency care center at New Orleans, and the man who runs the emergency program had his mother in a nursing home in Louisiana. Every day, she would call him, and say "are you comin son? is somebody comin to get me?" and he would tell her "yes mama, somebody's comin. They're comin on Tuesday. They're comin on Wednesday. They're comin on Thursday. They're comin on Friday." She drowned Friday night. The man telling the story barely knew the man of whom he spoke, didn't even know the mother he lost. Yet there he was, a grown man, sobbing, trying to tell the story on the air, and barely able to get out the words for all his grief. I found myself crying uncontrollably, so completely moved by the sorrow this man felt for his fellow man, and sorrowed myself for the loss felt by the man he spoke of. There is so much hate in the world, so much anger, and there is no room for it. With all the suffering in the world, with all the wonderment and good that can come of human emotion, to teach a child to hate is a sin against humanity. So much delineation, so much separating ourselves from others, so much saying that their pain is their pain alone, because they are different from me, separate from me. It may be unfortunate, but it is THEIR pain, not MY pain, so I need not concern myself. There is so much impartiality. So much disconnect. I am not a part of that. Sometimes I wish I were, but never really and truly. It is what I feel that makes me human. That makes me who I am. I would take pain over impartiality any day. Sometimes I see or hear something, and I am so deeply saddened, I literally feel my heart clench up in my chest and writhe within me. I finally understood why people associate the heart with human emotion. For me, it is where my body feels the physical reality of my emotion. I sometimes just sit and weep for the pain in the world. I weep for it now.

But I not only weep for the pain. Sometimes, when I see or hear something that I connect with, that inspires me or gives me hope, or something that strikes me at my very core in a way that rips me heart open because I UNDERSTAND, I cry. Not a weep for a loss or for a pain, but for the joy of sharing something with another human being. For the joy of that little girl on her father's chest and the comfort they hold for one another. For the joy of a man holding a woman, or even of a man holding a man. For the joy of human unity and of the subtle but oh so powerfully beautiful ways in which it is illuminated. I want to have children. I want very much to have children, so that I can raise them to FEEL. Raise them to absorb the world, to soak it up until they are as swollen with love and sadness and hope and joy as their mother was and still will be. I want them to feel what I feel. To see the world and the suffering in it, and to recognize the things that should change. And I want to give them the courage and the hope they need to change the things they can, and the solace they need for the things they cannot change. I want them to feel, to swell so full of emotion that they are completely unable to sit idly by and watch their fellow humans suffer needlessly. The will never be impartial, never be dead to the transcendent humanity that unites us all with one other. Compassion, empathy, unity, these are the only things that will save us. Love will save us all.