Open Wide & Look Inside

I’m no neuroscientist – heck, I can hardly spell it – and everything I say is off the top of my head, but folks do seem to have different characters. More interestingly, the same person – me, say – can seem to have different personalities at different times.

I can get quite excited while playing table football or ping-pong, for example, but feel completely different when sitting quietly next to a lake watching the geese slowly slide by. Is that the same person, or different people, or does one person have more than one side to them?

So, as a happily fully-confessed non-brain-nerd, I’ll offer my take on all that. It’s interesting. We can more or less guess how a scurrying ant or beetle will react if we stick our foot in front of it; the determined little beastie will either climb over or go around. Notice, also interestingly, that it will rarely turn round and go back. When an insect is heading somewhere in life, it’s virtually unperturbable. There’s a lesson right there too, probably.

Higher mammals such as cats and dogs show more complex emotions – well, we aren’t actually capable of detecting insects’ emotions anyway – but they are still quite predictable. Start opening the salmon paté can and Felix will appear out of nowhere, purring and pawing at your leg just in case you didn’t realise he was hungry. Grab the lead and Fido will have five heart attacks, spin around, yap, wag, jump and perform practically every acrobatic antic you can imagine hoping you won’t change your mind.

We humans are another packet of jellybeans entirely. We’ve got Emotions, e-motions, emojis, emoticons, and lots of ’em. Plus, we let them show, but it’s often very difficult to know which of those 44 dolls is going to be in charge at any given time. As I said, interesting.

Our society tends to encourage us to suppress our feelings and go with the flow or express only those few sides to our character which don’t upset or irritate others. But if they’re irritated, that’s their problem, isn’t it? Although I often get irritated by others, like the people having a barbeque and playing music below my window – Enjoying themselves, as they say, how dare they?! – that’s my problem too.

Most people aren’t evil, and most emotions are almost certainly useful, so I say, open up, un-nest and explore a few more of those 44 dolls and see what happens. It’ll be more interesting for you and for others too.

Be okay today.

Happy unnesting