Choked Up

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It is a strange feeling. The breathing seems difficult like there is a hole in your heart. A tear forms in your eye and you don’t know why. It is hard or impossible to speak.

A lot of difference experiences or recurrences can bring on this affect to the body. A memory or a certain sound or an image that seems to make your body throwaway reason and shutter with an uncontrollable emotion.

This is the season when advertisers and foundations work hard to create this emotion on you. Sick puppies or doe eyed children or even the family gathering brings the emotions of the time and breaks down the barriers to donate to a good cause.

Through the years I don’t think I was so attached to the emotions or I just looked past them. Numb to whatever was an attachment to my fellow person or experience was put away for another day.

Watch an extraordinary catastrophe and not blink an eye or hold a dying person without a tear must have been a trained condition. Don’t know if it was learned or just appropriate for the time when men were brave and had no feelings.

Tough it out or man up to the task without giving in to what was churning inside.

But lately I find myself adjust those sick puppy ads or those doe eyed children ads for I know I will react to them.

The first time I noticed it was a Billy Joel concert. He played a song “And we will all go down together” and as I watched, even knowing the song, I broke down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjzjhl-QztE   Just watched it and it still breaks me down. Sure I lived during that time but wasn’t in the fight. I did see the results come home on the train and knew a few who were in those boxes.

 Why this song? I don’t know. It was the first time I realized I could lose it.

Some Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel songs get a similar reaction so now that I realize it I try to avoid them.

I’m not saying it is bad or unmanly or even vulnerable to become overwhelmed by these feelings, yet as we learn about ourselves and know more about ourselves we can accept the occasional choke up.