I needed to regulate my emotions. Well, technically I just needed a way to tell when my emotions were flaring up unnaturally. I figured the best way to do that was to calm down and meditate. Perhaps if I had greater control over my emotions, I could tell when they were being taken out of my control. Then, I could come up with a spell to counter the Simurgh’s magic.

Emotions are fickle and unpredictable. They can be hard to control, since they can overpower the rational side of your mind and make you do things you know you might not have done if you were running off of pure reason. Emotions don’t always make you do things you shouldn’t. Sometimes, they can make you do things that you weren’t able to do precisely because you were stuck thinking about things and evaluating all the variables. Emotions bring spontaneity, they bring conviction, and they are certainly not something to be ashamed about.

Happiness is fascinating, if you stop to think about it. A beautiful day, a cuddly cat, seeing the face of your lover, there are so many things that can make you happy, all sorts of things that might even make other people feel sad or angry, but which happen to fill you with a warm feeling. Sunshine on a cold day might make you happier than sunshine in the Sahara. Snow on Christmas could bring a smile to your face, while a freak snowstorm might bring pain and misery to others. If somebody asked me to define happiness, to try to explain it to somebody who had never felt that feeling before, I wasn’t sure if I could do it. All I could do is give examples or to paint a description that dances around the edge of what it means to be happy, without ever truly being able to describe it.

Sadness seems easier to describe, at first. Loss, pain, something that makes you cry. But there is such a thing as tears of joy, happiness, or relief. There is loss that is complicated. Think of relationships that leave a hole in your heart but which you were probably better off without. There is pain that is bittersweet. Think of being sore after a good bit of exercise.

Anger seems simplest of all, but is it? Is it justified anger or completely irrational rage? Is it mild annoyance or unbridled fury? I have seen anger dissolve into disappointment, and wrath mellow down to mirth in moments. I have seen people driven to anger by drink or substance, and I have seen people fighting over nothing in particular.

And there are other emotions too, things like envy and lust, that are deceptively complicated. But even the definition of emotion and feeling is hard to define. The boundaries between different emotions are also kinda vague and blurry. Where does sadness end and grief begin? Are happiness and satisfaction different feelings? And what about when different emotions mix, how do you deal with complicated feelings and even feelings that you do not have a word for?

I remember mindlessly scrolling through the internet one day and stumbling across one of those lists of fancy words that nobody knows. Quite a few of them were for emotions that I had always felt but which I couldn’t find the words to describe, but after all this time, I couldn’t remember most of them. The only one I remembered was ‘sonder.’

‘Sonder’ is not a real world. I realized this after trying to use it in a college writing course and having the teaching assistant circle it with a big question mark on top. The word was made up by a person on the internet, who also makes up other words to describe concepts, ideas, and feelings that may not have words for them in English. ‘Sonder’ wasn’t a completely made up word, since it was actually a derivation from two words from other languages, specifically French for ‘probe’ and German for ‘special,’ although neither are perhaps perfect translations, but that was sort of the point.

Sonder, in its manufactured English state, is meant to represent the feeling that you get when you realize that other people have lives as complicated as your own. Ever met somebody’s gaze while walking through the grocery store and suddenly wondered how they got there? Where did they grow up, how is their relationship with their parents, and are they going to scroll mindlessly through the internet when they get home, too? All sorts of questions, some profound, some not so much, but the that feeling is a feeling, is it not? Is it not an emotion, and if so, why not?

There is a theory in linguistics and other related fields, that our relationship to language goes both ways. We define language, and language defines us too. Not just on the cultural side of things, where you might think about how nation-states might define themselves based on a common shared language, or how people might understand and sympathize with people who speak their language. What I mean is that language shapes the way you perceive and understand the world.

If your language doesn’t have a word for the color blue, you might find it harder to tell different shades of blue apart. Especially if you include different shades of blue into the word for black or green. For English speakers, this might be easier to understand for shades of red. Imagine if you didn’t have a word for pink, how would you define that color then? Would it not be just another shade of red? Or what about magenta, mauve, and maroon, couldn’t those just be shades of red too? Is the difference between a light crimson and a deep dark blood red less than the difference between the blackness of night and the dark blue of the night sky?

Language defines emotion. We differentiate between emotions if we have different words for them, and don’t care to do so when they fall into the umbrella of something else. We don’t think too hard about emotions we cannot define, and we don’t lose sleep over emotions whose definitions might overlap.

This ambiguity isn’t all that bad, if you think about it. If our emotions were well-defined and regimented, we would lose a lot of the colors of life, the rough textures that make life fun and messy and unbearably complicated. Art, in particular, would be so much more dull if emotions could be so easily defined. One of the things a good story does well is painting a picture of a character caught in those complicated moods, in a strange state of mind where simple words cannot define what one is feeling.

A good writer wants the reader to feel things that cannot be described in simple words. What other way is there for a person to feel the way melancholy bleeds into fatigue, or the way joy fades into happiness, except through words on a page, paint on a canvass, the inflections of an actors words or the subtle variations in music. Art thrives in the ridges between rationality and language. Art thrives in the liminal spaces between entries in a dictionary, the stuff nobody could ever teach you and which you have to experience yourself.

If I wanted to resist the Simurgh’s magic, the magic of Desire itself, I would have to find a way to deal with all of these questions and feelings. These were not things I could grasp tightly with my hands. If I tried to do so, they would fall out of my enclosed fist like water or loose sand. For mind control resistance magic, all I had to do was deal with a type of magic that explicitly controlled someone’s body. To resist a spell that controlled emotions, I would have to learn to control my own emotions.

I woke up bright and early a week into my little retreat in the mountains. I’d found a larger river about an hour from my cave and head out before dawn to catch some fish. Along the way, I foraged for food and enjoyed the view. The real trouble so far had been dealing with monsters without magic. Sometimes, I would fight off monsters with a simple flint spear that I’d made, but usually, I would just run away.

I’d made a little fishing pole with a large stick, stringy plant fiber, and a sharp bone for a hook. When I settled by the banks of the river, I could see the fish in the clear waters and would usually have something to eat by noon. On this day, I had brought along a large flat leaf and some pieces of red ocher. I held onto the fishing pole with one hand while making the ocher into red paint with the other. I began scribbling some lines on the leaf while I was fishing. I didn’t think too hard about what I was writing. The point wasn’t to write something amazing. All I wanted to do was to empty my mind onto the leaf, and feel at ease on a beautiful day with my legs dangling above the river.