Stepping Away From Feelings

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

               Nicely placing appropriate emotions into their appropriate time and place sounds nice, but to divide emotional stresses across separate and disparate situations in life is no easy feat. Your bad mood at home will most likely seep through the cracks to your mood at work. Many sites that involve lifehacks have sought to do just that, alas advises are always only a temporary bulwark against any psychological malaise if the help given fails to translate into personal actions.

               
              An attempt to keep our emotions in check is not only a noble attempt to assuage our evolutionary shortcomings but a prerequisite to raise our emotional intelligence. So what is the solution to this matter? I have one in mind. If we really want to avoid the emotional palette of our lives to be one messy splotch of feelings smearing all over the place than our approach to emotion should change. Emotions, good or bad, positive or negative are part of us much like our limbs are just an extension of our body, getting rid of unwanted emotions will not only end in futility but ill-advised. Like a buoy floating on water, it will bounce back up if being push downwards. And the push back will carry along a force, the negativity will rise back up with a vengeance. An alternate approach is to name it and to see the instances that draw out our specific emotions. What do I mean by this? say if you step on a ledge and a feeling of fear arise, then it can be said that our mind tags fear to height. Seeing where our minds tag what to where would give us an idea of who we are. We can also have a better control if we consciously tag it ourselves (i.e I am feeling afraid because of the height).

              It sounds pretty uninteresting but it helps, that is one of technique used in the Eastern meditation known as the Vipassana; it goes roughly like this: focus on your breath when distractions comes up (say a thought), then label the thought as thought or if an anger laden image appears in your mind just label it as anger and gently shift your attention back to your breath. Discarding every supernatural and mystical baggage that this technique might bring, what you have is a very useful tool. By labeling or tagging the emotions it allows your mind to frame it in a way where distance is maintain between you and your emotions, that will give it less power over you. This is why during a chess match it is easier to see the right moves when we take the role of a spectator, we are divorce from the emotional urgency felt by the players. Everyday life is just like that. When we see emotions unfold from a third person’s point of view we are not tethered by the biases the emotion encompasses, thus sound judgments are easier made. it is much easier to give advises than to take them. 

            So take a step back, a little psychological distance can go a long way, you won’t be able to avoid a little bit of spillover from one aspect of your life to another, but by identifying this emotions may it be labeling them or naming them you will in effect loosen its grip over you giving yourself a better foothold over your own life.

further reading on psychological distancing:

http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/pdf/vanboven.kane.mcgraw.dale.2010.pdf

Why Do We Exist?

Photo by Mohdammed Ali on Unsplash

   Why do we exist? and What is our purpose in life? are two separate questions all together. The latter "purpose" is essentially a question that is burdened with the task that has more weight than it requires. The only person that is apt to answer it should rest on the very individual that made the inquiry. Problems would inadvertently emerge when the solution involve a top-down answer, which attempts to compromise individual differences for monolithic certitude.

    For the former, there is an answer that I find resonates with me. The English physicist Brian Cox makes the case which I find very appealing, he said that because universe is infinite it is impossible for us not to exist, I will try to paraphrase what he say and include additional elaboration to articulate what I have in mind on his answer. Here goes:
 

   The universe is infinite, as a result; every possible state under its law is inevitable. As finite being relying on finite permutations, we would thus have no choice but to exist. There is a thought experiment, if one would to gather an infinite amount of monkeys to punch on a typewriter at random, which monkeys are generally thought to do, you will get the full works of Shakespeare. Implausible as it may sound, it is in every way possible. Remove the monkey and imagine every possible combination keyed, from A to Z to spaces and commas and you will begin to see that it is possible to arrive at any book imaginable, that’s what it means to have an endless amount of combinations, that’s what it means to be infinite. 

   Humans are each combination of chances and genetic variation that is subject to the same kind of probability like anything else that is contingent upon the laws of the universe. So, it can be said that we are each a unique works of Shakespeare being produce by the randomness of an immeasurable magnitude. 





References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZl3ohphHSE