Content(kc)

CONTENT?

How is it we have reached such a state where the prevailing winds incessantly blow bitter-cold fear? Is it a basal response—instinctual in all animals—of fight-or-flight? The adrenalin, coursing through the body in this state, knows no emotion. It is triggered autonomically in response to a perceived stimulus and can only excite the thoughts and subsequent reactions engendered by these perceptions. Both fight and flight are based in the same emotion: fear. Fear of not being able to survive leads to thought patterns accessing the situation—if we think we can win, we fight; if we think we cannot win, we flee, if possible.

In looking around I am beginning to think that life is an engine fueled by fear. Each emotion seems to use fear as a baseline, where emotions whose peaks graph closely to the baseline are stronger and those whose peaks are more distant appear weaker. This indicates—to me, anyway—that these emotions are rooted in, and grow out of, fear.

Take the two most recognized emotions: love and hate. These are polar extremes of contentment—which I see as the most distant emotion from fear. On a graph the line connecting both love and hate appears to be a bell curve with contentment at its apex and its two apogees intersecting, but not crossing, the fear baseline.

All other pseudo-emotions fall beneath the bell with anxiety but an uneasy, unstable meeting point equidistant from love and hate, extending between, but not intersecting, fear and contentment. To clarify: contentment is not a state without fear, but the state of least perceived interaction with fear.