There’s something I wrote down as part of Legend of the Ztarr (my manga series I’m currently writing) from a part of the story I haven’t gotten to yet. I hope it makes it into the story down the road, so I keep reminding myself of it. At some point, Adora (the main character) says “Pain is part of life and so, to me, that makes it a gift”. After saying this, she is told that those words are reminiscent of her father’s when he said:
Give me pain. Give me anguish. Give me heartache. For these are legacies to the living I will gladly endure. Countless are the dead and unborn who cannot know the joys of sorrow.
Ok, so her father, Kalen, liked to load on the cheese for his mini monologues…but I like the meaning. What Adora and her father have in common is their deep passion for living and how precious they consider life; even the painful, undesirable parts of living are precious to them. Perhaps it’s a little overboard, but they don’t even consider misery a “price to be paid” for living–even negative aspects of living feel like gifts in their view, because the alternative…nothing…is far worse in their eyes.
The term ‘negative’ when referring to feelings brings up another point I’d like to present and leads into why I’ve grown a distaste for many self-help talk I’ve heard. A business course I took included a bit of self-help type topics and ever since I’ve found the subject to be disappointing at the least. I don’t really like the constant focus on avoiding negative emotions. Embarrassingly enough I think I might be paraphrasing Deanna Troi here–but I don’t think there are negative emotions, only negative actions. There’s a range of emotions we all have, but it’s the choices we make due to those feelings that can be positive or negative.
But feelings are simply feelings and it’s a narrow viewpoint to categorize them in black and white. Sometimes it’s good to be sad. Anger isn’t always a bad thing either. It’s how we choose to react and what we do with these emotions that have good or bad outcomes. And here lies yet another problem I have with new age/spirituality type thinking; the unending obsessions with avoiding the ‘bad’ (negative thoughts, negative ‘energies’, and big black imaginary spots on your chi chakra aura thingy bla bla bla).
What a non-sciencey-edumacated-type gal like me takes away from learning about biology and evolution and the like is that it doesn’t seem like there are negative and positive human traits–that is to say, that everything we do and feel has a purpose and reason behind it. There’s a reason why humans evolved to feel sadness and anger…there’s a purpose behind the traits we have and it’s better to face them and understand them then to avoid them.
I suppose what Kalen said has a bit of Dawkin’s in it…I believe it was at the end of Richard Dawkin’s “Root of All Evil” program where he talked about how each and every one of us is going to die…and that makes us the lucky few; we’re lucky because there are far many more people who will never die because they were never born. I think Kalen would like that (if he wasn’t a fictional character in my manga artist brain).
Sara E.M. | 
02 22nd, 2011| 
