Emotion and Motion

“I love you” and the act of love. Which one do you think goes first? Do I “love” you because I acted like I love you. Or I acted like I love you because I “loved” you?

How do you know which one drives which one? Does emotion come first and then the motion continues? Or you already swung in such motion that the emotion naturally exists now?

Someone can act all caring and kind without actually carrying a feeling of love at all. From the eye of an observer, the act of caring and kindness is indistinguishable from love. But the person doing that might not actually feel any love at all.

At the same time, someone can love someone but from the outside, the amount of care and kindness is not enough for an observer to say. “Yeah that is love”.

Or what about hatred? Someone can hate someone so much yet did not do any harm to that person.

Or someone can act rude and cruel to someone without carrying any hate at all.

There are studies about smiling. That if you smile, even without feeling anything, somehow that smile would make you bit happier. The motion of smile itself, can affect your emotion. Where smile is not the effect of happiness, but the cause of happiness itself.

So what if you kept saying “I love you” - and take care of that person, asking how was their day, what did they eat for lunch, remember what they like, tend to them when they’re sick. Are those affection the product of love. Or love is the product of that affection?

At which point that they converge into a singularity? That finally, motion and emotion can no longer be distinguished, and that each empower each other continuously like a perpetual heartbeats?

Human being imitates each other all the time. Babies learn by imitating adults. We learn when to smile, when to laugh, when to cry, when to say thank you, when to say sorry, when to be angry, and when to be happy - we’ve learned a lot of social behaviors through mimicry. Even though some are inherently biological. Like hunger, that in turns make you irritable.

So if you imitate an emotion, do a mimicry of “love”. Does it mean that the love is fake?

Maybe it explains why rituals are very common amongst humans. We repeat words, gestures, routines, and many other things. Because emotion is unreliable. Our feelings are fluctuative. We can be grateful and annoyed at the same day. We can love someone and still be angry with them. We can care about something and at the same time feel too tired to feel anything.

But motion is predictable.

You can make breakfast for someone even when you are annoyed with them. You can visit someone sick even when you don’t particularly like going outside. You still say thank you even when you don’t really understand why. Maybe you keep repeating this motions, so that the emotion will stop fluctuating on its own, and starts moving into the direction of the motion.

Though the opposite is also true. Motion can start become meaningless. You can say “I love you” everyday before it can’t be distinguished with “good morning”. You can say “sorry” repeatedly that the word no longer means something to you.

So maybe love is not just an emotion. If love is only an emotion, then someone who loves another person but never show it can still possesses complete love. Yet, someone who consistently takes care, protects, remembers, and sacrifices for someone - can still say that they don’t feel anything. Even though from the outside observer, they would describe those actions as love.

Maybe love exists outside emotion, and outside the motion. Or maybe it exists on both. Or maybe half in motion and half in emotion. Or maybe its up to anyone who with hearts to decide what is love anyway.

Emotion drives motion. Motion drives emotions. And we’re stuck in this loop, constantly turning things we feel into things we do, and turning things we do into things we feel.