“The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.”
George Santayana
Feelings play a special role in building a life you will love. They serve as a compass that can guide you toward the right goals, but they can also gather up into a heavy burden that can stop you. Behind everything you do – or avoid doing – are your feelings. If you find you’re often stopping yourself, or if you just don’t know what direction to take or even what you really want, all you have to do is listen to – and understand – your feelings.
They’re always talking to you. They know what you need. Are they always right? Not always. Sometimes they mistake the present for the past. At those times, the fear or anger or hurt you feel doesn’t belong to today. Something has triggered them. As you might already know, there are ways to send feelings about the past back to where they belong so you can see today with fresh vision.
The problem is, you can’t use reason or logic to do it.
Reason and logic are latecomers to human development. Feelings have been with us longer and remain far more powerful. Happiness and hurt, fear and anger have all been put inside us by nature to protect us and keep our species alive. They’re in operation every moment of every day, driving us to act – or to avoid action. The expectation of pleasure or safety draws us closer to food, love, shelter. The apprehension of pain or danger pushes us away from snarling animals and unfamiliar territory.
For the most part, feelings do an admirable job of keeping us away from danger and sending us toward nourishment and affection. But they become increasingly tangled when we move into more complex areas. Nature sends primitive reactions into more subtle, modern situations so, although our survival is in no real danger, we cringe at the risk of rejection when we ask for a raise; we wince at telling a parent we want a career in acting; we give up our dreams rather than feel the guilt of becoming happy when our parents weren’t.
Often, we’re completely unaware of the feelings at work in our attempts to go after a life we love and we make the mistake of applying logic to these issues. The result is confusion After all, there’s no logical reason to avoid rejection or criticism or happiness. They won’t kill you – right?
Tell that to your feelings.
No, you can’t ignore your emotions. They’re strong and primitive and must be dealt with.
(How? Watch this space. And please send comments.)
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1 comment:
What I like about what you have to say is that you are writing about how people really are -- seeking, striving, moving. So much on this subject of feelings is so academic, as if you can take anger, or fear, and put it on a lab bench and dissect it. There is only us, with all our complexity, trying to live, and your post taps directly into that pulsating inner life that propels us forward or stops us in our tracks. I learned a lot from your words.
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