First thoughts for my MA thesis. Emotion is a strong element in our perception of the world. It is difficult to ignore and harder to quantify. One of our strongest and most powerful motivating emotions is shame. Shame is the first emotion mentioned in the Bible, that has Adam and Eve realized their nakedness, they covered themselves out of shame. Wars and conflict and battle all have been fought over honor and shame. Strangely enough in this modern world, we neglect the existence of this most base emotion, and instead we often move blindly through our world motivated to protect our honor and compelled to the beat of its drum to always avoid shame.
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I wrote a note to a friend today, and thought this would make a good post. Edited for public viewing and expounded upon. Sometimes we think everything is supposed to happen instantly, work, job, cultural adapation, friends, family, etc, etc, and everying is limited to this thing we call time. Its awful, but something I've learned specficially when Andrew's mom passed away two years ago, that there is a time and place for everything. For us, there was a time of intense grief, and then a time of healing, but that doesn't mean that we still have grief and still need healing, but there are times and places for it all. Yesterday, I sat church, with my own grief. Grief of time lost. Grief of loss of relationships. Grief of saying goodbye to my aunt and uncle as they move onward to Cyprus. I stood and sat in church as I used to watch my uncle do, and let everything wash over me. When I first watched him, I wondered why, and yesterday, I completely understood. My collegues i...
Last year, I found myself in a new group of friends, triatheletes. They are a werid bunch I tell you. Working out 3-5 times a week for fun and then they go on 100 km bike rides over the weekends. Sheesh. And I wondered why. So last year, Andrew and I started to take their pictures. There is nothing more educational about a group of people than suddenly whipping out a camera. As they got used to us, we began to learn why they do this. I'll never forget the sensation of walking amoung the atheletes as they prepped for a half ironman or long distance race in the Sierra Nevada, the mountain that towers over Granada. You could feel the buzz of adreneline, and the excitement was palpable. We stood with Liz and Juli, the trainers of this club that are some of our best friends. Juli usually actively particapates, but this time, he was an organizer of the race, and so he was just an observer and a coach. As everyone got into the water, and stood there waiting for the minute warning, h...