Now that the paper is finished I can shift my focus back to a little experiment I have been brewing up in my head... I have always been one to be driven hard and fast by my emotions. Everything I feel I feel deeply-anger, sadness, happiness, fear... whatever the emotion in my head at the moment generally takes hold of my heart. I used to hate this, it can be very inconvenient most of the time. But lately I have been trying to embrace the fact that I feel my way through life as opposed to envying those who think their way through life...The thinkers always seem so calm and collected... they seem to be organized, calculated and objective. In comparison to some thinkers, feelers may seem like loose cannons... society judges feelers as unpredictable and weak- even the sciences dealing with feelings are considered 'soft'.
So, while I do believe that living an emotionally charged life is tough at times, it is also rich and exciting. I think that living life any other way may be too boring or stale for me... but I can see the pluses to not having a visceral reaction to everything. So, for the last month or so I have been testing out a hypothesis... Can feelers choose what they attach emotion to? If we are conscious and purposeful is it possible to suspend emotional attachment?
So far, the answer is a shaky yes. It takes some serious vigilance, I have to continually take the emotion out of my reaction and hold it out in front of me. In essence I am taking the emotions that I am at all times subject to and holding them out in an objective form. This is not easy, while I try to be as mindful as I can in my daily life, this requires a degree of attention I have not as of yet mastered. I think that trying it out in one subject area is a good practice to be able to incorporate it in my everyday, moment to moment processing. I am by no means professing that I am going down the path of objectivity from here on out- that would be preposterous and a gross oversight in the richness that flows from me being me. I am simply cross-training so to speak- if my natural inclination is to do things x way, then why not try my hand at y right?
So far it is working, and so I have my fuel to keep up this little experiment and see what unfolds. There are an infinite number of ways this could pan out... I may grow tired of objectivity and fall into my ocean of emotions at any moment... I may fall pray to my emotions even with strict vigilance and constantly reminding myself to stay objective, I may dull the sharp, cutting edge of my emotions all together and decide feeling is not all it is cracked up to be... I might loose my mind and move to Ireland too, all of these are possibilities, some maybe more likely than others, but I'm gunna stick this one out... I am looking at the specific situation with an imperial mindset... when an emotional response comes up, what is that about? Where is it coming from and why? I want to know if my emotional responses can be boiled down to simple triggers, markers, and measurable variables... if so, than in similar circumstances I should be able to change my reaction based upon the manipulation of said variables...
Seems like a lot of energy to expend on something so intangable, I know. But what is there to conquer in life but the self we subject ourselves and others to all the time right? There are always more corners of your own mind, experience and complexity to explore, I want to be the one who knows me best.
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