The greatest physical pain a person can ever feel is quite probably bounded by suffering any one of a dozen or so uniquely unpleasant ailments but the greatest emotional pain is almost singularly attributable to the suffering of others.
Emotional experience is the essence of compassion and peace of mind but it is a subjective quality not isolated in any one individual any more than a word possesses its own meaning. Emotional experience is a shared, distributed property of our lives and just as with words which acquire meaning as a function of their relationally networked properties, individuated artefacts and isolated entities are meaningless tokens that can be recombined in meaningful ways. Much the same could be said of human beings, their diverse communities and their invariably incompatible systems of belief.
With all its joys and sorrows, emotional connection is only what it is because our all-too-brief lives are rendered meaningful through connection and interdependency.
Daedelus Kite 