Some people think of emotions as something basic, a kind of experience that can be described by just a few simple words. They believe that emotion is cut and dry.
It’s worth noting that the word dry is often used to refer to the dreadful quality of being without emotional interest. Dry writing is more likely to put someone to sleep than to make them feel something.
On the other hand, dry can be an feeling in itself, as with the case of the emotion serene. The concept of serenity is derived from the Greek word for dry: xeros. Xeros is also the root of the word xeriscaping, a kind of gardening that works with the natural lack of rain in some local climates, rather than fighting against it with irrigation.
The origin of being serene is specific to the dry climate of the Mediterranean, in which rainstorms were perceived as aberrations from the typical state of things, troubling and dangerous intrusions into what should be an orderly, predictable world.
To have a serene life, is to have a storm-free life. Serenity is what it felt like for ancient Greeks and Romans to be in a dry place.
It is not a coincidence, then, that in present-day conventional business culture, which borrows so heavily from Ancient Greek and Roman culture, people feel most at ease when the rather moist, cloudy, and fluid experience of emotion is kept at a distance.
So it is that the dry quality of serenity is both an emotional experience and a rejection of experience. Such contradictions are at the heart of most emotions, which turn out to be not very basic after all.
