I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, largely because I must. With a lot going on, I thought I needed to learn more, to help me make better decisions. And therefore, for a month bender, I just kept reading. Books were everywhere. To be fair, I’m still doing a bit.
However, I have backed off. Perhaps I got tired. Yes. Above that though, sometimes, if you get stuck into too much stuff, you can plainly become dry.
There’s a broader issue at stake here. What’s more satisfying in life, logic and reason, or emotion? I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. As I learn more things, I undoubtedly get a buzz. It feels awesome to read something and a light bulb goes off, “Bing”! Those moments are gold, where you feel things: ideas, concepts, inclinations resonate with what you’ve read, coming together.
On the flipside, what about just pure emotion. How does that feel? Well, it affects your body and behaviour. You want to run, eat, just go to sleep sometimes. Just go out at other times. It more immediately affects your actions, and you literally sometimes feel it deep in you.
So, consider now emotional intelligence. That is, the cultivation of an ability to temper your emotion with logic and reason, conscious self-awareness, so as to not let emotions “get the better of you” so to speak. In pondered whether you could in fact work things in reverse. That is to reason yourself into any specific emotion, be it happy or sad. I never quite concluded whether this is possible, but that’s something of the basis of cognitive behaviour therapy.
Ultimately, after much consideration, I’ve concluded that most of our lives, and that of humanity, is driven by emotion, whether we like it or not. And though we think our logic and reason guides our path, it likely ultimately doesn’t. And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this. You see, the truth is, having emotion is just simply a lot more heart starting than rational analysis, or at least can be.
Emotion is, by its very nature, prone to be labile. Happy or sad. That light and dark bring colour and depth to either. And there perhaps is the role of the rational self, to rather nip the extreme of things in the bud. Nevertheless, sometimes it’s good to “just let go”. For me, if I listen to music, it still takes me somewhere. That same music I listened to as a teenager even, and I can feel what I did back then, or something close to it. Well, I’ve still got it. The old reptilian brain is still there. And the point is, that’s a good thing. It makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?
I once had a patient who went through bouts of depression, and they said to me, “Sometimes it’s nice to sit down at home and feel melancholy.” I didn’t’ quite know what they meant at the time. It was confusing. Reflecting back, maybe that’s it. It’s simply nice to be able to feel emotion, any emotion, rather than become completely practical, matter of fact and dry.
Enjoy your emotions. Accept that you can’t really choose them. Let them flow through you like a wave, knowing that just like a wave – big, small, rough, calm, gushing – they’ll leave and almost certainly return again, someday. Finally, take stock of the likely underestimated power emotions exert on most, if not all, of your decisions.
Now, I better get back to reading!
