Best of the Week: Emotional Truth

In my opinion, the best part of what we discussed in class last week was when we got on the slight tangent about emotion vs. truth. In a way, our reality is just pieces of emotions layered on top of each other. It isn't the detail that you remember, it's the emotion. The most important job creatives have is to get their audience to feel emotion. Without emotion, their work is meaningless. They're just authors with invisible words. Painters with blank canvasses. Musicians with silent sounds.

However, there is a line between creating emotion and stretching the truth. There is truth in the fact that people are comforted by hearing what they want to hear, but there's also comfort in wanting to hear the truth. Being able to ascertain the reality of a situation (when it comes to human interaction) is more important than fabrication of an event to reveal emotion. But in most ways, the reality of the event is the emotion. As Mr. Allen said, think of a movie theater. It's just arranged light, but it has the ability to contort the emotions of every viewer. So how can you combine emotional truth and factual truth?

That's where arrangement comes into play. It's the backbone of emotion; all artists play with it. For writing in particular, language becomes. Think of a piece of writing that speaks to you-- the way the words are able to ebb and flow and intertwine with one another. If you rearrange the words, craft them into something meaningful, the emotion is rich and has the ability to progress beyond the text. Thus, words have the ability to emulate both the fact and the emotion. And that is the most meaningful out of all.

Captured Thought: Living for Yourself

The world would be a better place if people only did things because they truly loved what they were doing. There's a sort of enveloping comfort people seem to seek in only doing what they know, and thus a false sense of love associated with something that's familiar. But in our society we have a tendency to be subconsciously manipulative. Most of our actions are driven by our human nature to race through our lives opportunizing success. 

But what are we racing towards? What is it we all want? A fulfilling life? Our life is only going to be fulfilling if we absorb the full potential of our lives as opposed to taking shortcuts to successes. However there are two ways people tend to go about this. One is by focusing all of their energy strategizing around these essentially unfulfilling actions. The other is not even knowing where to go and only half-heartedly committing to everything. Most of our lives are in the unexpected, so what do we gain by meticulously planning every detail of our lives? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't set goals. I strongly believe that goals help us get our lives on track and even give us reasons to keep going. But the problem is, most goals aren't geared towards our happiness or well-being. And when we base our actions off of these goals, there is no passion to what we do. 

The other problem with not doing things because you completely love them is you are more likely to hurt people around you. I am involved in many competitive environments with theater and music, and although there's a sense of unity within the programs, there's always an underlying self-dependent energy. There's a tendency for people to be very sycophant and manipulative. If you really loved whatever you're doing, you shouldn't need to impress anyone. You should live for yourself, and do whatever makes you happy. 

If everyone focused on keeping something in their lives they were able to be completely passionate about, not only would people be more positive, but more focused and productive in changing the world.