I am not normally an emotional person.

This is both a true and a nonsensical statement.

It is true in that over the course of my life I am habitually a non-reactive type of person, not prone to either touchy-feely displays or to bouts of self-pity, that curse that accrues with a feeling of entitlement. Having said that, I must admit to anger. It is my most accessible feeling, and what eruptions I do have have tend to be related to rage, yet normally those only surface in moments when I am threatened, either physically or emotionally.

This is one sense of the statement “I am not normally an emotional person.” In this sense it is a true statement. Yet, as Damasio (and others) have shown, emotions are something deep and pervasive; not the simplest rational decisions can be made without reference to this, our first, discriminatory tool.

So whether the statement that started this is true or nonsensical is not really a valid question. It is both.

What all this tells me is that normally, my emotional reactions are there but that they are invisible to me. Having said this, it is not as simple as saying that I am unaware of my emotions and therefore I have a problem, but rather, when the background discriminatory tool that are feelings is functioning well, when the blare of anger is not needed to drive a self-protective response to some asshole who thinks he can play chicken with me because I am a middle-aged woman in a nice car and he is a 19 year old with his same-aged friend in his mother’s car (and with her insurance), feelings are supposed to be unobtrusive.  They are like a gentle ocean with a minor tidal pull. Feelings guide the boat of our reasoned decisions to make sure we take into account things that reason, for all its brilliance, is simply not complex enough to accommodate.

And so of late, when I go out into a sunny, brilliant day, with cherry blossoms rising in the updraft, pink flutters in the blue air, and still I feel as if I am riding under the black wing of Raven, I cannot help but wonder to what extent reason is in fact just another face, and extension of, the thing called feeling. Which, of course, makes nonsense out of a phrase like “unemotional person” or for that matter “emotional person.”  It’s like saying a four-legged biped or a two-legged biped.

My capacity to understand the day, to experience it, to think about it, and ultimately write about it, cannot occur today without the raven-wing any more than it could occur without the background swell of contentment that would more fittingly be there as a response to such a beautiful day. Normally I take my response to a day like this, to sun and fragrant air, and simply accept it as part of “how it is.” I don’t question whether it is reasonable to be happy on a fine day. This is, I think, right. I do question the sense of vulnerability that comes with the raven’s wing.

To question one and not the other is just a matter of habit I suppose and not really a matter of correctness in any moral sense. People function well together when, as a group, they respond happily to a fine day and probably wouldn’t if we all were acting like depressed over-thinkers instead. So it might just be that having feelings normally occur as a quiet (but powerful) guidance system is just what we evolved because this is what functions well for us as a group as well as for us as individuals.

To my credit, I do realize that this intimacy with Raven will go away. Since this haphazard emotional state seems to have to do with the endocrinal shudders associated with menopause, I suspect that when my body is finished turning down the tap on oxytocin and other please-let-me-take-care-of-you chemicals, things will return to the formally smooth state, although I suspect the colour of my sea will be substantially different.

I just hope the rage stays.  I rather like my “I will kill you if you threaten me” response to idiots and other undesirables.   In this, the evidence seems to suggest I may in fact have greater access to my willingness to bash the rude and dumb. I understand that once menopause has settled my body into a steady state, I will feel even less inclined to avoid conflict and even less likely to do the work necessary to keep unproductive relationships afloat. For this, I am glad. Roll on senescence, to thou I will offer tribute. And to you, Quiet Feeling, the ram’s blood.