Air represents Emotional style

The Air element symbolises human variety in emotional style or temperament.

In normal situations, air can be relatively calm or turbulent. In more extreme circumstances, the condition of air can range from the unnerving sterility of dead-calm to the threatening insanity of a tornado.

Sometimes our emotions provide us with a meaning and guiding direction, just as a steady wind will take a ship to where it needs to go. On other occasions, emotions blow in more frantic and unpredictable gusts: in these circumstances it is sometimes best to just wait until the storm has blown itself out.

Without huge complexity, the energies of our emotions can be constructively harnessed, in the same way that a windmill turns to grind wheat. But the human condition is such that our windmills cannot be expected to turn predictably and without interruption.

Without air we cannot live, and without emotion we are not human. Just as air can be fresh, life-giving, exhilarating, warming or reassuring, so it is that our emotions can support all of these and many other human experiences. But we have to take the rough with the smooth. If we accept that our emotional condition is fundamental to life itself, we have to accept that with life comes sensitivity, vulnerability and from time to time a sense of emotional insufficiency. What human has lived without moments of despair? But such moments eventually dissipate and, in time, our emotional condition moves us to a new quality of breathing, the like of which we may never have experienced before.