As a birthday present, I woke up to a plate of assorted fruit in the fridge for breakfast. I didn't eat it for breakfast though, because I had a coffee instead. But it did make a good lunch. We also went out to dinner last Friday and I received a booking for a massage at a pool centre, where we will swim together afterward. It is a few weeks away.
Birthday's are normally a reminder of life, but I also almost died on my birthday when I drowned in a pool as a kid, when I was eight. It was the second or third near death experience I had had by that time, with the first being a severe fever as an infant (my earliest memory) and being electrocuted, which I think was a few months after the drowning, but it might have been a bit before it too. There have been several other near-death events and conditions since. So yeah, my birthday is also a reminder of the alternatives.
Counterfactuals (not to be confused with alternate truths) is imagining what could have happened, but didn't happen in the past. For instance, if I had died as a baby, or in that pool, or been electrocuted, everything past that point in the timeline would have been different. For me, I wouldn't have existed past there, but for others, they would have been affected in various ways. Those who knew me like family would be affected in one way, but then there are all the people who would never know me, and therefore be unaffected by me. However, because I didn't die, those people were affected and the experience shifted as it did.
And while we can't go back and change the past, counterfactual thinking is a pretty brilliant piece of machinery we have, as it allows us to simulate and predict multiple outcomes. Even though they didn't happen, it can inform us and teach us lessons for the future. However, it is also a broken system that can have negative effects, because we can "rewrite" history within ourselves and perhaps negatively influence the takeaways.
Being able to go back and "correct" our behaviour mentally, where we reimagine saying and doing something different is probably a process we use to reconcile the past and also heal ourselves from various harms. But as you can imagine, if we rewrite it in some ways, we can actually create more internal conflicts and more harms that were not consequences of the actual event. We can amplify the negative impacts, rather than disperse them, widening the wounds and creating a larger pile of baggage to carry around with us through life.
But the better use of the counterfactual is when we use them to mitigate the damage of the past and overcome the damage we might have taken, so that we become stronger for the experience, not weaker. Instead of being victims of circumstance, we can take responsibility and be agents of change in our own lives, choosing to act toward being the kind of person we want to be, rather than being forced to be the kind of person we feel pressured in being.
While each person is free to react on their emotions as they please, there are always consequences to our actions. We have created a culture where people are hyper-sensitive to their current emotional state and feel entitled to act based purely on emotion without thought, as if it is the truest, most authentic version of ourselves. But I do not think that our emotions are anything other than guides that point to issues we should explore, rather than facets we should act upon. Especially when they are negative emotions, we should use them as pointers to improvement, not buttons to launch reactions.
It is hard though, especially when we feel strong negative emotions, because they flood our bodies with a whole range of chemicals that make us more reactive, and far less thoughtful. Rather than looking at the alternatives of the situation and ways to respond, we act based on some simple mechanism of feel this way and act uncontrollably, often doing harm to others and ourselves in the process, creating more instances that have to be reconciled, that raise more negative feelings, like guilt and regret and disgust.
Sometimes I think acting on negative emotions are like getting caught in a rip at the beach. The body gets swamped by the wave, panics and starts to swim in the opposite direction toward the beach it is being pulled from. It seems like the sensible thing to do. However, what should be done is to swim across the rip, because swimming against it is a losing battle that will tire the body until carried far out to sea. The "logic" of the reaction to the feeling, is not logic at all. Actual logic would be to understand the situation first, and then choose a course of action. Emotions make actual logic difficult to apply.
However, if we can put our emotional response on hold for a little bit, then we can "go back in time" and work out what kind of responses are appropriate for the situation. If this isn't possible in the moment, we can go back later and reflect on our actual response and discuss ways we could have alternatively behaved so that next time, we are a bit more prepared.
All of our experience can prepare us for the next moment, but if we aren't willing to learn from what we experience, or if we only experience indirectly, then what ends up happening is our emotional response takes over, because we haven't practiced how to delay reaction. A lot of life is lived theoretically from behind screens now and while when things are calm we think we are in control, once a situation comes into play that causes panic, we often find our control is lacking. But, we then believe that we are entitled to behave that way, that we did the best we could, that the situation warranted it, because we felt so strongly.
We are justifying being unprepared.
Life and death are two sides of the same coin. Keep flipping the coin and life might come up time and time again, but death only need show its face once.
Taraz
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