How to learn the culture of feelings
The inner world of each person exists real and independent of us, but we can not feel it directly – we can not see, hear, or explore with the help of the device. We learn about it only by observing how this or that person expresses himself – by sight, word, deed, facial expression, movement of the hand and body. By themselves, all these movements do not say anything – we have been learning to read them all our lives, learning to comprehend someone else’s soul. This is exactly the same as we learn to read: after all, lines on paper are also not spoken, but we learn to understand the meaning hidden in them.
Feeling can not be “taught” in the direct meaning of the word, but the feeling can be conveyed, it can be “infected”, it can be called. By the love of his person, a reciprocal feeling of love arouses in one who has never felt it. Passion for knowledge, a person infects others. Sincerely loving your subject, the teacher carries us.
Thus,
No matter how turbulent our life may be, no matter how much we ourselves suffer and rejoice, it proceeds in a very limited framework, and we could never embrace the whole wealth of human feelings, if not for fiction. Here we read the story of the hero in the book. If the book is good, he appears as alive to us: he loves, suffers, struggles… How can we understand him? Only in this way: sensitivity. We must, must respond to the sufferings of the hero, that is, experience the same feelings that he is experiencing. At first we sympathize, then we feel.
But, of course, it is impossible to learn to feel only from books. Books only expand our awareness of the feelings of people, and real, living feelings are caused by life, real relationships with the people around us. In each of us there lives sensitivity, the ability for good feelings. Remember that empathy, empathy always support people. Let us learn to understand, that is, to experience the same feelings that a mother,
They say happiness is when they understand you. It is right. But no one will be happy if one does not become a person who understands other people who accept them just like others, with their own lives and their own feelings, who are able to sympathize with them, to respond to their feelings.
Thus, the steps in the “school of feelings” are as follows: other people – other people’s feelings – sensitivity to them – their feelings…