Hunger: An Emotion of Nourishment

I was 10 years old when I wrote my first research paper.

I chose to study and write about my miniature dachshund, Lady Gwendolyn of the Woods, and her breed, because she seemed paper-worthy with all her many opinions in such a small body, and you got to do a presentation. I had the best visual aid immediately available.

On Thursdays our teacher gathered us together, and over the course of the semester, we began to learn the basic methodology of research. There were gems of skills within the research we began to do:

chose a topic, narrow it down

Ask questions and then choose a primary question

use a card catalog, or find one resource that will lead to other resources

open and explore books, articles, and media

utilize notecards for little bits of information, create a system and capture the information

Develop an outline to begin communicating your ideas

repeat the aforementioned until full to the brim with conceptualization and clarity

write.

Since then, I have repeated this process a hundred, maybe even a thousand times. And since then, my hunger for information, research, and the formation of concepts, the daily seeking of clarity, has only grown.

Research was my first experience with the emotion of hunger, outside of eating and consuming food.

Hunger, psychologically, appears to be still tied to that insatiable sensation of emptiness in our bellies. It is an under-researched emotion as far as breadth goes. Do a quick internet search for “the emotion of hunger” and come up with dieting tips, psychology related to emotional eating, and advertising to convince me how much help I need. Yuck. How quickly we move from emotion to judgment of that emotion.

It is a point of argument within psychology and other related studies, whether hunger, as a physical urge within the digestive system, is an emotion at all. A sense does not an emotion make, but emotions are the complex connection of our state of consciousness within a sensory experience. Consider the florescent lights at your local grocery store: they are light, they are maybe even bright, but it is our awareness of those lights and our current state that produces how we feel about those lights, likely related to a thousand other experiences with lights and outside of lights. We are complicated.

I think understanding hunger as an emotion outside of food is a better place to be, to find a safe and mindful space for understanding our hunger in relationship to food.

hunger

/ˈhəNGɡər/

having a desire or craving for what is lacking or perceived as lacking

Hunger is a spectrum of desire, and that inner desire is strong enough to be felt at least. I wonder if we apply hunger when we yearn for something that we perceive to be empty or we feel in danger of finding ourselves empty. My research doesn’t give me the classic pit in my stomach when I have missed lunch, but go too long without it and I ruminate, turning a challenge or confusion in my mind, chomping at it while trying to create something —- nourishment.

We all as humans long to be nourished. We long to be nourished by vitamins and minerals, but also by connection, growth, and pleasure. Ah, are you starting to see it, why hunger is not evil or wrong or even so easily gone astray? Sure our desires are easily tainted and tangled, but they all sit as good gifts of God, feeding us more of his good gifts. Like any of His good gifts, we may try to take and twist them, but they serve us better if we  sit with them for connection.

The author of Ecclesiastes is often one of our primary examples of mildly depressive symptoms in the Bible. The author perseverates on life’s lack of meaning and purpose, at least within what can be seen in the present season. And what else is behind the words of Ecclesiastes? Spiritual hunger.

I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him. (Ecclesiastes 3:10-14)

All longings within us are at their base a search for God, for meaning in this giant and overwhelming universe, for something more and better than the emptiness we find so often as humans trying to navigate the world. Knowing this doesn’t solve our hunger, but that isn’t the point. I want you to know this because I want you to be free to feel and understand yourself. When you have a sense of hunger, ask yourself:

What am I longing for?

What nourishment am I seeking? food, friendship, pleasure, success, connection, etc.

Be nourished with greater clarity by allowing yourself to be your whole self, without putting aside what you feel you need, for fear you will immediately follow after all those things insatiably. Asking ourselves curious questions usually dampens our needs related to excess rather than prompting them.

Psychologists discuss hunger as a gate, an emotion (or non-emotion) which lets in other emotions and perceptions so that we can adapt to our life and world and figure out our needs. In this, I think hunger is likely also an emotional elevator. Like surprise, hunger brings other emotions forward or attaches itself to other emotions so that we can more clearly sense and see them, get in touch with them and utilize them as informants for what we need in our present moment.

When you are hungry for food, it brings forward emotion, and if you have a lot of emotions, you likely might open the food sensing gate more easily as well. Ahhhh, that makes sense as to why it is so easy to emotionally eat.

So, what about emotional researching? Is that a thing? Haha. Yes, my deep need for clarity is likely, at its core, a longing for some nourishment – of knowledge, of clarity and less confusion in this world, but I can also identify it as a longing for God. I want to know God and the power of His resurrection. In fact, I want to know God’s everything. I am then, by nature, a person of hunger and it behooves me to pay a little attention to it.