Lived Experience

When my first child was born, I spent countless hours during her first months of life simply staring at her sleeping face, amazed at her tiny existence, and the way that every conceivable human emotion would wash over her features. Her angry scowl would split into a wide, open-mouthed grin, followed by a grim look of mystification, and on and on it would go. She felt everything all at once, even before she had experienced anything apart from being wrenched into this world and stared at. I wondered at the wordless thoughts that accompanied these expressions, if they existed at all. She seemed to have entered the world with the whole spectrum of human emotion already latent inside of her, just waiting for life’s experiences to give vent to its various expressions.

Later, in my 30s when I became serious about running, I similarly marveled at the way that my own emotions would vacillate dramatically during every run, from the depths of despair at ever finishing my goal distance, to utter elation that I was doing something difficult but beautiful and my body was equal to the challenge. Those emotions would surface inside of every run, but I started to prefer running up and down giant hills because then, there was an external explanation for the arc of those feelings— running downhill or on flat surfaces was joyous and running uphill was dreadful. I would have had those same emotions without the obvious challenge of the hills, but when I run on flat surfaces, there is no hook to hang my feelings on, and they run amok.

I wonder how much of our modern miseries have to do with narrowing our lives in such a way that we lack external stimuli on which to hang our feelings. We narrow our lives with electronic devices, with overwork, and most recently, with the horrifying isolation that accompanied the pandemic. How much of our mental health is wrapped up in simply finding an experience that will give vent to the feelings that we all must express over the course of our lives? The sorrows, the joys, the trepidation, the mystery— all of these things we need to feel in turns. When our lived experience becomes too limited, nothing is there to elicit our inner dramas and call them out onto the stage of the world.