One of the benefits of articulating emotional granularity is that it allows us to identify and experience subtle shades of emotion. Rather than lumping a wide range of emotions under a single label, as takes place in schemes of Emotion AI and the 20th century theory of basic emotions, people who have cultivated the perception of emotional granularity are capable of communicating about and dealing with extremely specific feelings.
So it is that people with a high degree of emotional granularity can understand there is a difference between longing and viraag. Longing is the desire to be close to someone or something. Viraag, on the other hand, is the Hindi word for the painful feeling of being apart from a loved one.
A feeling of loss and lack is different from the desire to overcome that loss and lack. The distinction is narrow but as vital as the distance between the diagnosis of an illness and the decision to treat it. Viraag is the sensation of separation, but longing is the emotion that urges us to do something to end that separation.
There is a gap between emotion and action. What we feel doesn’t always translate into what we do. It’s only when we look at the nuances of emotion in high granularity that we can distinguish between the moments in which people are merely having and holding their feelings, and the moments in which they are preparing to make concrete change because of their emotion.
Even longing is a gradient of emotion, ranging from a low grade, nagging feeling to an urgent intensity. Operationalizing away these subtleties may result in an inability to understand the difference between love renewed and love lost.
