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Today's
Meditation:
I would never argue that our emotions are negative
aspects of who we are. To me, our emotions provide
an important guide and meter as to how we're doing in
life, and it's important that we honor them and pay
attention to them. But like Baruch, I've seen that
if we let our emotions control us, if we allow ourselves
to be swayed constantly by those emotions into behaving
certain ways and making certain decisions, then we can no
longer say that we have any sort of control over our own
lives. We cannot even say that we make our own
decisions or our own choices if those decisions and
choices are based on our emotions rather than our instinct
or our logic.
It is easy to become too attached to our logic, of course,
but that's not the point here. The point is that no
matter how valuable they may be, our emotions are not
trustworthy indicators of just how things are going or
just what is the right decision to make in any given
situation. I love following my instinct, but
whenever I feel my emotions getting in the way of any
decisions, I see a huge red flag going up, for I know that
my thinking isn't necessarily clear when I'm letting my
emotions sway me.
Lao Tzu tells us that we shouldn't act when the waters are
stirred up and muddy, that we should be patient and wait
for the mud to settle and the water to clear before we
take any action. To me, this is a beautiful metaphor
for the difference between making decisions when our
emotions are riled up and making decisions when we're
thinking more clearly.
We've all seen people make emotional decisions, and we've
all had the experience of wishing that they wouldn't do
so, wishing that they would wait until they calmed down a
bit to react or decide or act. None of us are ever
completely in control of our own lives, of course, but
when we allow our emotions to run things for us we
definitely are giving up much of the control that we
actually do have, and we run the risk of losing any
mastery that we may have.
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