Have you ever had an intimate sharing and then had your partner ask how it felt? When you’re obviously distraught, do people ask how you’re feeling? The rational mind has moved into the territory of feelings–which evolved as a form of nonverbal communication–and reduced them to words. When extremely distraught we might be given a reprieve, but otherwise we are expected to come up with words to describe as closely as possible what we feel. Still, it is not the feeling itself.
It seems as though sharing our feelings has come to mean anything but actually sharing the feeling. People make careers out of talking, analyzing, singing, and writing about feelings. Why have we become so afraid of raw feeling? Why have we created a culture that marginalizes feelings? We’ve gone so far as to call ourselves rational beings, relegating those who would make feeling-based decisions to a weak underclass.
To be fair, we allow women and children their feelings, but only in their own worlds. If a woman wants to function in a man’s world, she needs to be objective and have full command of her rational capacities, which means she set her feeling self aside. And to be fair, a man is allowed the occasional feeling, but only if it complements some rationale.
Every day I see people rationalizing their actions, either trying to convince themselves or others that what they are doing is based on sound logic. It’s obvious to me that they are just justifying their emotionally-based actions, probably because they feel compelled to maintain the illusion of being rational beings.
I believe that nearly all of the decisions that we make are emotionally motivated, and that it would be far healthier for us to admit it and create lives that allow the free and spontaneous expression of feelings, rather than having to resort to bar buddies, best friends, and weekly counseling sessions to allow what’s going on inside of us the light of day. Imagine your whole life being like those precious moments when you feel uninhibited and allow your feelings to freely flow. After all, it is the way of all living things–even us humans–if we could allow ourselves to function as we are designed. Then perhaps those blissful moments could become a blissful life.