Living a Happy Emotional Life
We all live lives rich in relationships and punctuated with emotion. Lovers arrive, bringing gifts of passion and tenderness, and then exit, marking their passage with anger and sadness. Children flash into being, evoking previously unimaginable exhilaration and exhaustion. Friends and family members tread parallel paths, sharing our emotions, and then pass on, leaving grief and memories in their wake.
Across all our relationship experiences, what balances out our anger and grief is our joy. All human beings share the capacity to relish intense joy and the desire to maintain such happiness in an impermanent and ever-changing world. Also universal is the fact that our personal joy is determined by the quality of our interpersonal connections. When our relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and romantic partners are happy, we are happy, and when they’re not, we’re not.
Yet joy doesn’t drop magically from the sky into our hearts and minds and stay there. We create joy—through every decision we make and every thought, word, and deed. When we manage our emotional experiences and communication poorly, the interpersonal sorrows we wreak on others reflect back on us in the form of personal unhappiness. When we steadfastly and skillfully manage our emotions, the positive relationship outcomes we create multiply and, with them, our happiness and the joy of those who surround us.
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POSTSCRIPT
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We began this chapter with the story of a woman committed to transforming the lives of teenagers. Vy Higginsen founded Gospel for Teens in part to create a musical refuge for young people to escape their emotional turmoil. But she quickly learned that her students’ emotions couldn’t be suppressed, and that through sharing their emotions with one another they could more quickly heal their wounds of anger and grief.
How do you manage the emotional challenges of your life? Do you leave your baggage at the door, burying your emotions? Or do you let your baggage in, sharing your emotions with others?
The story of Vy Higginsen and her students reminds us that although we have emotions, we are not our emotions. It’s our capacity to constructively manage the emotions we experience, and communicate them in positive ways, that makes hope and goodness in our lives possible.