Day of Feeling 2

Ok, I keep ending up with too little time to really sit down with things.

I am observing my feelings slightly more often than I normally do, but without any significant increase in intensity, unless blogging about it is a significant increase in intensity. It could be.

There are a million things I could talk about, as I had a million feelings over the course of the day.

One thing I want to sort of tackle a little bit, before I go to bed later than planned, is Feeling-Space. This is something very powerful and omnipresent in my life, but it is something I understand very little.

Feeling-Space.

For example: it is 2006, and I am contemplating what it would be like to visit St. Elizabeth Homeless Shelter, to see if I can volunteer. I visit it one day, and I am left with a certain impression. As I think about my experience, I am fixated on the Feeling-Space. My imagined conception of "what it would be like" has a certain feeling. This has everything to do with expectation and anticipation, but there is very little that is intellectual or instinctual. This is an experience of concreteness. To describe it, I could say that when I anticipate "what it would be like to work at the shelter," I am treated to a little show in my mind, of course compacted into a single moment's sensation, where I can see the pine trees growing outside of the shelter, except perhaps they are a little bit abstracted, against abstract, unelaborated backgrounds. I can smell the earth at the entrance, feel the cool late summer breeze that blew in front of the door. This all gets bundled into a single Feeling-Space.

Feeling-Space is not a concept I have learned through analysis; this a very natural and familiar imaginative activity. When I try to motivate myself to do something, I bring up an appropriate Feeling-Space - the power of feeling compacted into a single moment.

It has everything to do with motivation, anticipation, expectation, hope. Negatively, it has to do with resistance, disappointment, disillusionment. Perhaps Feeling-Space is the illusion that I am cured of.

I have a hunch that Feeling-Space is something familiar to everyone. As far as I have seen, it has never really been articulated, never really been differentiated from other feeling experiences. Actually, different feeling experiences are not really differentiated much at all. You just say "I had a powerful feeling." What does that mean? We have general labels like happiness, sadness, awe, wonder, anger, frustration, jealousy. These terms are not empty; they distinguish feelings based on the types of judgments and sensations that accompany them. But Feeling-Space has unique imaginative content to it as well. Is this another level of feeling that we simply have not developed language for?

Should I perhaps identify it as Feeling-Image, rather than Feeling-Space? I'm almost tempted to call it a Being in its own right - it is unique, organic, and it, well, feels alive. Is Feeling-Space related to that very shadowy and controversial topic known as Other People? Is each Feeling-Space another being in my life, just as much as the people I work with?

Many, many questions. I'm glad I decided to open this line of inquiry. I feel I have not even touched upon a fraction of the issues this idea raises. I have a practical need to understand it, too: I feel that Feeling-Spaces toy with the way I relate to the world and the people in it, perhaps acting as a feeling substitute for Other People. How does it function?

That will have to do for now.

Good night.