If I ask you how are you?, what would you answer?
Your answer will probably be well, well, pulling, more or less, etc. You can do the test if you want with family or with your friends, you will see how little emotional language we have.
Most of us have been raised to be practically emotionally ignorant.
The other day I was having dinner with my partner and my children on a terrace. As we sometimes do when we sit down to dinner, we ask ourselves: how are you? Our answers must go beyond the typical good, etc. having to look for the emotion we feel. My daughter answered “calm”, my other daughter answered “satisfied”, my partner answered “happy”, and I didn't know what to answer.
The word “calm” came out, but I looked inside myself and knew that the emotion I felt was not calm; then the word “sadness” came to me and I understood that it was not the emotion I felt either, I kept looking inside myself until I realized that my emotion was: nostalgia.
Understanding the emotion I was feeling, “homesickness”, made me accept my feeling between calm and sadness. I then felt an inner peace when I understood that this emotion was due to the fact that we were having dinner in front of the apartment where I lived before moving in with my partner.
It was like an encounter with myself, it was like understanding myself, accepting myself and knowing that the emotion was telling me that I felt proud of my time living alone in that apartment.
