Today, a significant number of people all over the world celebrate the feeling of love, in the form of Valentine’s Day. And while February the 14th became a globally recognizable symbol for love, along with its teddy bears, heart-shaped chocolates and cards, many other days from the calendar have been dedicated by nations, religions and other types of groups of people to this one specific feeling, love.
For example, Romania celebrates romantic love on February 24th on a traditional holiday that we call ‘Dragobete’, a mythological deity similar to other gods of love encountered around the world.
Love is not the only feeling humans celebrate, happiness and its many manifestations are also honored globally. But why do we celebrate only the good feelings? Why don’t we celebrate all emotions?
All of our emotional spectrum makes us living beings, who we are, ensure our survival and assist our development and adaptation. Yes, some of them are not pleasant feelings, but that does not make them less significant or intense than those that make us feel good.
Celebrate fear, for it lets us know we find ourselves in the presence of danger, celebrate sadness, for it helps us cope with loss or lets us know something must be changed. Celebrate hate even. It teaches us about ourselves.
Sure, the world could perhaps be imagined without some of these feelings. We want to eliminate the bad ones. But at what price? Diversity of emotions lets us discriminate in the diversity of our reality and world. Fewer emotions, less discrimination, less diversity. And less diversity means less beauty, fewer miracles of nature.
I think we should celebrate our overall capacity to have emotions in the first place, all types of emotions, because the bad guy in this story is not portrayed by bad emotions or feelings, but by not being able to feel at all.
So, celebrate love, today and every day, in all its forms, but maybe we could also dedicate time to celebrating us being emotionally complex beings too.
I praise, observe and guide cognition, but its interaction with the emotional realm is what makes everything come together into an amazingly diverse and beautiful existence.