Feelings in Colored Lenses

When you are wearing sun glasses that are tinted blue, everything looks a bit bluish. Things that are not blue look blue because of the lenses you are looking through. In a sense, we are always looking at the world through colored lenses. We never see things the way they really are. Our feelings are like colored lenses that makes it impossible for us to see things the way they are.

For example, consider what happens when you walk down the sidewalk. To an old lady carrying a shopping bag, you are one of those wild youngsters. To a child on a bicycle, you are an obstacle. To a friend, you are a pleasant sight. To somebody from another neighborhood, you are a threat. To a construction worker who is trying to put some new concrete, you are a nuisance. To a member of the opposite sex, you are a feature attraction. To each person, you are something different. The difference is not in you. It is in the feelings of the people who see you.

Feelings are not things we choose. They rise up in us spontaneously. We have feelings all the time. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste or touch gives us feelings. We have an immediate emotional response to everything our senses put us in contact with. Our emotions may be strong or weak, long- lasting or quickly passing, but there is always some emotion.

If we look over our past experiences, we may so able to understand our approaches to many of the ordinary situations in everyday life. Most of us have a regular set of feelings that rise up whenever we encounter old people, members of our own sex, members of the opposite sex, parents teachers, dogs, water, flowers, the color red, a knife and so on. The key to understanding our emotional response to all these things may lie in the past experiences we have with them. If we recall the past experience, we will understand the feelings.

However, past experiences are not the only source of our emotional responses. We also learn many emotional responses from other people. Very few women have had any painful experiences with mice. Yet many women become afraid at the sight of a small gray mouse. This is an emotional response that little girls learn from their mothers and then pass on to their own little girls in the next generation. Most prejudices against a certain nationality or race or religion is learned by children from their parents. The emotional responses we have learned from other people have become as much part of us as those we learned from our own experiences. They have become part of our way of looking at the world.

Besides our past experiences and what we learned from others, our present fears and hopes color our view of reality.