Rebuilding Rob

When I was in college, I had a course called educational psychology. The professor of this course would often say “feelings are“. At the time, this just sounded like some New Age mumbo-jumbo that I anticipated hearing on a college campus as a white heterosexual male in the mid 1990s.

And as I’ve let that expression a dance around in my head for the weeks, months, and years, since then, I realize it’s true. Even today, my current counselor, Lomax, echoes a similar sentiment.

Feelings, or emotions if you will, are neither positive nor negative. They just…are. Yes, on the surface, we look at happiness or pleasure as positive emotions; whereas we look at sadness and pain as negative emotions, but the truth is, it’s more about what we do with those emotions that determine whether they are a positive or negative experience, that simply the emotions themselves.

For instance, take a sadist, or even a murderer, who takes pleasure in hurting or killing other people. Is pleasure still a positive emotion in the scenario?

When I hold you in my arms
And I feel my finger on your trigger
I know nobody can do me no harm
Because…

Happiness is a warm gun

The Beatles

Or what of the empathetic soul who feel sadness and misery over the pain and suffering of others? They take that emotion they feel as motivation to donate to charity or work for a nonprofit organization feeding the homeless. Is that sadness or misery a negative emotion in this case?

But the paraphrase Brian Johnson from The Breakfast Club: in the simplest terms, the most convenient definition, happiness is the positive emotion that I feel most often. Being with my children, a baseball game, a sunny day, a Star Trek rerun, or even the satisfaction of seeing my students succeed academically are some of the stimuli that elicit happiness in me. I’m a pretty easy-going guy. It doesn’t take a lot to make me happy.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Rob’s Retro Movie Review: This is Spinal Tap (1984) – The Movie That Scaled to Eleven
• A Death in the Family (And My Disposable Income): My Life in Comics
• The Supporting Cast: Navigating the Eras of Male Friendship
• Life is What Happens: A Look Back at My Non-Existent 2025 Vision
• The Moment I Walked Inside a Hallmark Movie

The article ‘Happiness is…” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.