Emotions are amazing.  I love being in love.  I love being filled with love.  I love happiness and joy, and in the right time, sadness.  It’s all part of the human experience. However, emotions will absolutely serve as a lens for any situation you experience.  When you feel tension, if you can set yourself away from the emotional part of the experience, I can assure you that this tension is a direct result from the emotions you feel about the situation.

One must consider when dealing with humans, particularly, that we are all emotional creatures.  Whether we admit it or not, we all want to have our emotions validated and reciprocated.  When we’re in love, we want love returned.  When we’re miserable, we want to be with people who share our misery.  When we’re happy, we seek out companionship that feeds our happiness.   

All of us are emotional.  Every single one of us views our subjective experience through this lens.  To be human is to have emotions.  Which… inevitably leads to conflict.  Now, how this conflict is resolved relates directly to our ability to emotionally set ourselves apart from a situation.  If we can act from a place without ego (pride in our emotional experience), we can resolve all conflict smoothly.  Think of two young men who drink at a bar one Saturday evening.  One is self-conscious, and the other is prideful.  They drink to excess so that their expression and experience of their emotion is inflated.  This is what alcohol does.  Don’t believe me?  Get drunk. 

The self-conscious man is, by nature, going to take all of his external stimuli, and in his inflated sense of lower self-esteem, will deem any questionable stimuli as people aggressing against him.   The prideful man is going to wonder how all people don’t love him, how there could ever be any question of adoration of him in any person’s mind, and will fight for his own allowance to continue this feeling.

Mr. Self-Conscious and Mr. Prideful happen to use the bathroom around the same time. Mr. Self-Conscious, in his inebriation, leaves the bathroom first, not realizing that Mr. Prideful is two steps behind him, and allows the door to shut just as Mr. Prideful is nearing the walk through. Mr. Prideful utters, “Asshole.”Mr. Self-Conscious hears this and stops in his tracks. Mr. Prideful opens the door, steps through it, and sees Mr. Self-Conscious standing outside of the door, presumably waiting for Mr. Prideful to confront him.  Mr. Self-Conscious would rather not have a confrontation, but is too drunk to figure out that it would behoove him to just go back to his seat at the bar and ask for a coffee.

Instead, the emotions running thick, these two men perceive the other as a threat to their manhood.  A fight ensues.  Punches are thrown; sweat, spit and tiny droplets of blood are thrown around the hallway in front of the bathroom. The bouncers escort both Hooligans to the door, permanently barring them from ever visiting their local watering hole again. Both guys are really lucky that the police weren’t called and that eventually they both made it to a safe pillow to lay their bruised cheeks upon while they sleep off the toxic elixir coursing through their kidneys and liver. 

The lesson from this story should be obvious!  Neither one of these guys “wanted” a fight.  Neither of them “wanted” to be kicked out of their local hangout.  Hell, these boys may have even known each other– and might have even been friends.  So why did they fight? They fought because their emotions were a lens that painted a picture that gave them no other option but to fight.  (They could’ve fled, but then they’d lose their rank in manhood.)  They fought because their emotions made the picture look threatening.  The same story without emotions:

Mr. Self-Conscious (at a much lower elevation of emotion) leaves the bathroom, letting the door shut behind him.  Mr. Prideful (at a much lower elevation of emotion), reaches for the door, opens it up, and walks through the door.  Within a minute of each other, both find their seat and order another drink. Both return to the same bar the next Friday, looking to drown their sorrows in liquor. Life goes on.

What does this mean to you, personally?  Take the lesson about the emotional lens to heart.  If you are experiencing an intense or inflated emotion, ask yourself if how you feel is affecting how you perceive the situation.  If you can take your emotions away from the situation and view the experience objectively, and you still see things the same way, then great, you’re thinking and behaving from a rational point of view.  If not, perhaps it would be a good idea to not make any decisions at your Time Of Inflated Emotion.  *shrug*

I’m just sayin’…

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment