“How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?” - Virginia Woolf

Feelings: What are they, are they real, where do they come from and where in the realm of space do they exist. We proclaim all of the time how we are feeling and what we feel, but aren’t feelings just as intangible as trust, faith, love and God?

I came to this quote probably about 5 or 6 years ago while studying Virginia Woolf in a Women’s Literature class in college. The tone of her prose is definitely one of those that can be classified as glum and with no encouraging ends to the means. That doesn’t mean it was not incredibly satisfying to the mind and completely filled with metaphors of which you just want to sit and detangle and mull over, aligning the ways in which you feel. Most recently I finished a book that had this very quote tucked into one of the author’s sentences as a way to, in his words, capture all that which he was trying to express.

I sit here running those two sentences over and over through my head trying to really unwrap them. The way we act out on our feelings, express our feeling, expose our feelings, and withhold our feelings- they all come from something. This something could have been an action, a reaction, or even a lack of action that drove us to take a plunge of sorts and arrive at some strong feeling. A feeling that we held with such importance, such immediate importance, a feeling that we needed to express, scream out loud, call for attention, or even retire into a world of depression and isolation.

Sure, I’ve been there and so have you. You have felt something so deep and so enjoyable or so painful that you can’t begin to believe the feeling will ever pass. You are consumed with feeling. At some point however the feeling passes, it dissipates into thin air and is no longer there, it seems to have just marched away alongside the tick of a clock. Did it ever exist, and if it did where is it now. After all, existence is to be present and accountable.

But when the feeling passes, when we come out of the “underground” as Woolf calls it, how much of those feelings come with us? Do you remember all of them? Do you remember the pain or the joy that you felt in either that fleeting moment or painfully long period of time? After all, you’ve come up from the underground, and in doing so you’ve shed the shapes, colours, and triggers for which the feeling was. So when we ask, “how are you feeling or what are you feeling,” are we trying to dig up something that really isn’t there, doesn’t exist and is just as intangible as love, faith, trust, and God?

So my trip-up to all of this is: should you act on feelings if they really aren’t a guaranteed and lasting thing? I guess it could apply to all other intangible things in life. Do you act on love and faith and trust? You invest in stocks, you invest in your job, and you invest in real estate. These are tangible things that you can measure, see, watch, develop and grow. Why do we invest in those that can not be tracked, measured and accounted for? Those are the most difficult to subscribe to and most definitely the most debated, the root to which all of our personal and sometimes global problems stem from and furthermore they are the things that most haunt our present and derail our future. So is there really any good time to expose our feelings, act on our feelings, and therefore act on impulse?

I can tell you one thing. Some of my most enjoyable moments and memories have happened because of impulse and fleeting feelings while some of my biggest mistakes and most hurtful decisions have likewise come from impulsive feelings. What is most important and do these two extremities balance the other one out?