Emotions and highs and intensities are all so relative in different people. Just looking at my own friends, looking at the people I’ve been in contact with, people that I’ve confided to I realize how strangely equal we all are in our pain, suffering and sense of joy.
It’s all relative.
For example, the child who gets the balloon she’s been asking her mom about the whole day. To the child, this simple thing can cause heights of happiness none of us can seem to reach anymore — thus making us wish to be like a child again with those very same emotions. What happens, though, when the balloon pops? or breaks away from the child’s clumsy grip? — disaster. Her emotions are thrown down into an emotional turmoil and she cries. For someone older, it would just seem like another balloon, but to that child it’s the world — and losing that balloon means the crashing of that beautiful world.
It seems unfair, doesn’t it, that what’s the world to one person is so different than the world to another person. Those who have seen a lot of loss in their life couldn’t even imagine what it’d be like to cry to something seemingly petty like a balloon. — But the question is how hard would that same person cry if they again lost something that brought them joy as the balloon did for the child? That same intense happiness and that same feeling that nothing else is wrong in the world?
What if in one instant it all disappeared? –I’m sure that person would cry too.
Or at least plummet into the depths of despair.
It’s like Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway. At first he wails because of a tiny papercut, but after being stranded on the island for even just a few days we see how drastically his sense of pain and suffering has changed. Where before the scenario with the papercut was pure hell for him — it becomes a position he would probably rather be in a thousand times over. — However, this doesn’t mean that he didn’t feel any pain during the time of the papercut itself. It was excruciating to him at that moment, probably one of the worst pains he’d ever had.
Even though comparitively the papercut seems petty, at the same time in that moment that pain was the worst that he knew in that moment, so in a way, it was almost equal to any other worst pains he subsequently has.
That’s why I feel sorry for jaded people. It’ll be harder for those people to find the things that make them excruciatingly happy and at the same time they’ll suffer the same pains of loss. Where the simple child can just get another balloon and have the world back in her hands, the jaded people may never again find something that can brighten their lives.
