I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
Not knowing what to write about this morning, I drew a Tarot card, both as a guide to my day and as a way to hook into something to write about. I drew the Ten of cards. A couple stands together apparently in celebration of their bountiful life. Two children dance beside them. The couple looks out over a stream, a house, and a lush landscape. Overhead, a rainbow shines with ten cups arrayed in an arc.
This card is not just about positive emotions, writes Jessica Dore in Tarot for Change:
There is a family here, holding hands, dancing and giving a very convincing performance of joy. But the rainbow of cups in the sky tells a different story, that there is variation in the emotional energy of the card. In real life, the type of connection depicted here—family, intimacy, togetherness—is not all rainbows and butterflies. It’s also anxiety, loss, envy, disappointment, fear, anger, despair. If it weren’t so, why would there be a multicolored rainbow? Why not just a bright yellow stripe in the sky?
Dore further shares findings that being able and willing to feel a range of emotions is associated with better functioning:
In 2017, positive psychology researchers published findings that suggested emotodiversity—which they defined as “the breadth and relative abundance of emotions that individuals experience”—is more significant to wellness than happiness. When they asked 175 adults between the ages of forty and fifty to record their positive and negative emotions over thirty days, they discovered that those who reported a broader range of emotions had less inflammation, a biological process that has been linked to both early morbidity and mortality, but also to emotional states.
She suggests that focusing on mostly feeling happiness could be a mistake: a human life is characterized by many different emotions and being willing to feel them all is healthier than always seeking out the positive.
Over the past few days, I’ve been emotionally “wealthy.” On Friday, my father had a bad fall. He was weak from the flu. I followed the ambulance to the hospital where Ray and I waited with him for four hours in the ER until they decided to admit him.
I felt fear and anger at the ER. The ER doctor didn’t know until four hours in that he had tested positive for Influenza A, because the doctor who handed him off to her hadn’t told her. She was treating it as a “geriatric fall” and not as an older person suffering from serious consequences of the flu. In the ER, he was using oxygen and she assumed he used it at home too. But his oxygen was low because of the flu and she didn’t understand that until we had been waiting many hours. The original doctor ordered two cat scans but no chest x-ray to check for pneumonia. The doctor was talking with my dad about letting him go home when I said, “Hey wait a minute! He shouldn’t go home. He fell because he was lacking oxygen and was weak from flu.” And she’s like, “what are you talking about, he has the flu?”
So I was angry, and I was worried about my dad.
But I was also feeling other emotions. I felt grateful for Ray for driving me to my dad’s place and then the hospital, and accompanying me as we waited long hours in the middle of the night. I felt relieved that it seemed my dad would be ok. I felt glad that my dad’s partner called the senior living EMT who then called the ambulance.
I wonder if one reason emodiversity shows positive associations with health and well-being is because people who experience more emotions are less avoidant of situations that might bring discomfort. Many of the good things in life bring with them the less positive emotions. Applying for a new job, asking someone out on a date, training for a marathon — these things may bring anxiety, pain (of rejection or physical), fatigue. You could sit around and binge Netflix all day and night and not feel any negative emotions. But you wouldn’t feel the feelings of accomplishment, the joy, the satisfaction that getting yourself out in the world doing things you value would do.
Because I’ve always been willing to do hard things, to put myself out in the world into risky situations, to go after what I want, I’ve had a life rich in emotions. I like thinking about this as a kind of “wealth” I’ve cultivated.