Inside out
After 10 years, four (plus one) new emotions suddenly emerge. I wonder, where were they all these years? Were they suppressed by the overwhelming Joy, Fear, and Sadness? Who knows? It took Pixar 10 years to let them out. 😊 These emotions are Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment.
The one emotion that keeps trying to surface but gets pushed back by these new kids on the block is the one I identify with most these days—Nostalgia. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately. As you grow older, there’s a tendency to live in the past—the good old days!
Recently, two statements challenged me: "Burn your bridges every season of life" and a quote from Thomas Merton: "We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners all our life!" But there’s an opposite danger in youth—forgetting the past, aside from trauma, and justifying the present based on that past trauma while ignoring the good things from before. Enough about Nostalgia.
Let’s talk about Anxiety. In *Inside Out 2*, Anxiety takes over, efficiently supported by Envy and Ennui (who is in his own world), while Embarrassment seems unsure of what to do. Anxiety clearly emerges as the leader of the pack, much like Joy was in the first movie. Anxiety pushes Joy and her friends into a corner to the point where Joy starts to give up. At one point, Joy reflects, *"Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less joy."* I find that hard to agree with. If there hadn’t been seasons of joy amid all the anxiety I experienced, I would have perished long ago!
To say these four emotions—Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment—are just passing feelings during puberty is inaccurate. Most of us experience these emotions at various times, even long after puberty. Some of us continue to live with Anxiety as the leader of the pack.
The scene where Embarrassment teams up with Sadness to work against Anxiety is worth reflecting on. It’s often these so-called “negative” emotions that spark a desire to break free from the clutches of Anxiety.
But the movie’s ending is excellent—how Joy pushes Anxiety out with the help of her friends is worth celebrating. In real life, though, it doesn’t usually work that way. No matter how hard you try, Anxiety has a way of pushing Joy down. Internal reflection and attempts to push out Anxiety often don’t succeed.
C. S. Lewis, in his book ‘Surprised by Joy’, writes: “The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is, in one respect, misleading. In introspection, we try to look 'inside ourselves' and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately, this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities.”
He goes on to say: “I call it Joy... The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day, there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it....”
"I call it Joy, which is a technical term here and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again... I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power, and Pleasure often is.”
Like C. S. Lewis says, I should “Shut my mouth; open my eyes and ears.” Only then can I experience Joy—the kind that comes from the One who gives Joy and pushes Anxiety out!
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