Scouting The Emotional Landscape

The experience of writing while learning has been positive. The process involves frustration, but I have been getting into the habit of interpreting this emotion as a compass of sorts, pointing me in a direction.

For example, I've noticed that my bass improvisation is heavily dependent on a few minor pentatonic licks and my songwriting is decidedly "poppy". Instead of interpreting my frustration at my inability, I interpret it as the very mechanism that lets me know there's a deficiency I feel I ought to address in the first place.

In this light, frustration is the emotional equivalent of physical pain. We can interpret pain as to mean "That activity is beyond me" and shy away from it or else we can choose to delve deeper: maybe we need a rest, or maybe our technique wasn't right, or maybe we need to tone down the intensity of the exercise.

Ever since listening to the philosopher Robert C Solomon's course on Emotional Intelligence I've taken this approach in dealing with my emotions. What I find is that the very act of contemplating them adds distance, and that distance has a tangible effect on my emotional landscape.

What this means is that frustration tended to be accompanied or aggravated by other emotions such as anxiety, sadness, despair and so on. These feed into one another and amplify their effect of my general countenance: I feel frustrated so I feel sad about my lack of skill and grow desperate. Instead of dealing with the issue at hand I self medicate with food, nicotine or affection until the cycle repeats itself since the underlying cause of my frustration had not been dealt with.

So being able to look at frustration and understand what the emption is communicating, in terms of its judgement of the world I am experiencing, untangles it from the complex of emotions and makes it easier to handle.

I wish it were always straightforward but the reality is that it can be tricky to enter a calm enough frame of mind to have a civilised and open minded dialogue with your emotions. Sometimes you have to accept the difficulty of a thing worth doing and do it regardless because even doing it haphazardly is better than not doing it at all.