Similarities between a loving wife and a synthesizer
A wise old mate of mine once said that one of the most important things you learn when you get older, is the ability to “snap back to normal” when you get upset, angry, anxious, or whatever other negative feelings that wash over you. I can totally relate. When I was younger, I could get stuck in a negative thought loop for days. And that is very pointless. Currently at 41 years of age, I have improved significantly in this regard. It is much rarer that I get stuck in the same way. There might be two reasons for this. 1) My “snap-back ability” has improved and 2) Maybe I don’t get nearly as angry nowadays? If you decrease the amplitude, you won’t have to cover as much distance to get back to normal. Could it perhaps be that most of it comes back to reason 2)? In that case, it would certainly feel as if 1) comes with the package.
I just realized that one can draw some very nice analogies between emotions and synthesizers here: ADSR – Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release. You could think of the event that triggers your emotions is a key press on the keyboard. The key is pressed instantly, but the emotions can wash over you very quickly i.e a short attack time, or build up slowly – a slow attack time. Can we perhaps practice our “emotional attack time” and prolong it a bit? That’s like attaching a longer fuse, to use another idiom. This sounds like a useful skill to me. It should also reduce impulsivity.
Decay, is the time it takes from the maximum emotion to snap back to a Sustained level, that is kept as long as the key is pressed. I usually get maximum stress from an event at first, and then it drops off a little and settles on a constant level until I do something about it. And when the key is released, The sound produced on the syntheziser can either die instantly i.e. zero release time or an extremely fast “snap-back to normal”-ability. My younger self would have a very slow release time. Maybe this all sounds like jibberish to you, but if you are an audio engineer or a synth guy, I suspect you know exactly what I am thinking about here.
I have had some bad gut feelings, negative clouds hanging over me for a couple of days now. I am not entirely sure why. But yesterday I was having a conversation with my wife, and she said something that I was exceptionally unprepared for. And I enjoyed it tremendously. It was like having an ice bucket on your head but with good, positive emotions. My emotional state shifted instantly to a nice place, and I was kept there for the rest of the evening, several hours. In audio terms: Very short attack time, a little decay, a looong and strong sustain and then a very slow release time.
It made me remember our first week as a couple. She is such a petite and pretty little gem, and out of the blue when I least expect it, she can say something so outrageous that my legs literally can’t carry me, and I can laugh until I cry and can’t breathe. That’s some true love right there. She does these things every now and it’s the contrast that gets me every time. It’s a bit like taking a naïve listener into an anechoic chamber (acoustic laboratory) for the first time. They enter a huge room with no reverberation and then the sensory impression between the eyes and the ears do not harmonize at all. Cognitive dissonance. When we see a large room, we expect longer reverberation times, not shorter. And this is just like my wife, and the number one reason I fell in love. It’s the same with music by the way; The best songs always contain an element of surprise, something unexpected.
Her crazy unexpected remark yesterday instantly triggered my memory in exactly the right spot, and I was brought back to those first weeks when you are in love. There is nothing on this Earth that can compare to that feeling. It must be a very good sign that I still experience that feeling in 2024, almost ten years later. Wow, it becomes more real when I see it in writing. I am grateful beyond words that I was able to find this feeling again yesterday. Maybe that’s another wise lesson here besides the “snap-back ability”? Remember what made you fall in love in the first place, so you don’t miss it when the behavior occurs as you travel the road of time together. That sounds like a very important skill to practice. Last night before we went to bed, I made sure to explain to my wife how happy she made me. And just like every single time before, she was completely unaware that she even did it. It’s like when you have a friend that always makes you laugh without ever trying to be funny.