Echo Beach Tide Pools

"...But There's Very Few Folk in Focus."
By Keith Alan Johnson 01-29-2000
{Lyric by Greg Lake}

I don't enjoy negative emotions. I'm pretty sure most of us don't, though I could be wrong. We all have our different ways of coping with negative stress. Some methods work and some don't. I figure if you're alive and aware, then your method of dealing with stress is working. I just read an article about a man who committed suicide. He stood up from a black jack table, shouted "NOOO!" and put a bullet in his head. I believe his method didn't work.

Somewhere along the line, as I was growing up, I decided that I was not going to feel the negative emotions, anger, sadness, what have you. I don't know where that came from. It wasn't a conscious decision, nor did I consciously act on that decision. I merely zoned out. I wouldn't focus on it. I wouldn't "feel" the emotion. I got pretty good at it. I was considered a happy child.
The problem was that I wasn't focusing on "any" emotion. In the process of burying the negative I successfully buried the positive as well. I went through a couple of years in high school with the nickname Zombie. But burying of negative emotion was my coping mechanism. It was faulty but it was mine. It was working for me. There was no incentive to change.

It worked for me for ten years after high school. It worked so well that ten years zipped by with nothing very memorable happening in my life. Sure, there were events that stand out, but they were far and few between, and my personal growth was relatively slow.

Fortunately I had fallen in with a good group of friends. I was able to relax and look around a little at life. Near the end of that ten years I met a girl and fell in love. Within four months we were engaged. Life seemed to be going very well.
Soon after our engagement something didn't feel right. I had become somewhat agitated. At times I would find myself pacing for no reason that I could pin down. I had let down my guard against emotion and some of the negative emotion was creeping in. Perhaps that was what enabled me to see that the engagement wouldn't work. After a week of this agitated state of mind I broke off the engagement.
That was the lowest point in my life. Up until then the only way I knew how to cope with sorrow was to ignore or deny my feelings. But I'm no Spock and this couldn't be ignored. Even though I was ill prepared, the only thing I could do was to go through the despair to get to the other side.

As a result I'm more in focus now then I have ever been before. As an interesting side effect I've found that the joyous occasions I have felt since then are far more intense. Sure, the sad ones are more intense as well, but I can cope with them better now. If I hadn't been knocked off center I would still be hiding in a shell. I rather doubt I would be exercising any creative muscles either.

Perhaps we need these "bumps" in life in order to keep ourselves in focus and growing, to keep stretching ourselves, tempering the steel as it were. Some people experience some very big bumps. I've heard many stories where someone has had a harrowing or tragic experience and has come through on the other side excelling in some new and creative direction. Maybe this is what they were talking about.

God forbid we should all have harrowing or tragic experiences. Perhaps it just takes a little focus.

01-29-2000

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