Explore strange and alien emotions

We can all agree that reading expands your mind.

Add knowledge and facts.

More abilities, in some cases.

Great writing can even create new perspectives and attitudes that you can adopt.

But can it do more than that?

Instead of just building your brain, can it also build your heart?

What an excellent question my friend.

It certainly can. A great book attracts us. It makes bear the fight of the hero. We feel the conflict and yearn for its resolution.

Sometimes we understand emotion, other times we don’t.

Either way, it expands what we feel.

What can we emotionally relate to?

Some people want to get better, but they don’t really know what that means. I get it. It is a nebulous and abstract concept.

When someone tells you “be better”, what do you do?

Well, there are many approaches of course.

And one is exactly this: exploring how other people process their emotions. To feel what they feel and see the world through their eyes (and hearts).

Because your emotions color how you see things. A sunny day looks gloomy when your heart is heavy.

A thunderstorm is spectacular when you are brimming with optimism.

So understanding how other people feel about things is a shortcut to how they think about them.

And reading good writing is a shortcut to that.

The trick here is to push the envelope. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Maybe you’re already a genius at serenity, handling a storm of office paperwork like you’re sipping a beer by a lake.

In that case, a book full of emotion might be just what you need to expand your world view.

If gardening is the most tedious task you can imagine, find a book where the main character loves it.

Where is your joy, your meditation, your connection with nature.

Look around you and see what excitement you are missing. Easier said than done: after all, you’ve never been out of your own mind before. You might think you know what ‘fear’ or ‘love’ is, without actually feeling it.

This may require a lot of introspection.

Pulling back the layers of your self-delusion.

Find the places where you fake, where you exaggerate, where you are numb but have learned to pretend otherwise.

(The best way, in my experience, is to realize that you’re feeling confused. If someone else’s reaction to something confused you, that might, and I say might, be a place to explore.)

And once you know where the gray parts are on your emotional palette?

Read books and poetry on that topic.

You will probably find them tedious at first. Of course, after all, you are not in tune with the central theme.

Stick with it though. Eventually you will read something and something inside you will change.

At that time, your life will suddenly become richer and more enjoyable.