November 9, 2018
We humans have these great brains. We did not invent them. We are born into them. We are the beneficiaries of larger forces here, and we enjoy a vast array of connections for which we can be grateful.
Many of us, though, may weary of the rich lives we have the opportunity to claim, and sometimes envy other life forms.
The wolf, for example. Member of a sleek, muscular tribe, plenty of fresh air and sunshine (prairie dog tunnels are for losers), plus great scenery all day long.
Or, if you like swimming, you could envy porpoises. Porpoises have a good time on purpose, and they’re always smiling.
And eagles. Top of the food chain, top of the sky. Living large. Talk about fresh air and sunshine. This is the life! Spot a rat from a thousand feet, dive down for nice pre-brunch appetizer without crushing your beak, gobble, yum, and while you’re swallowing, whether or not you chewed well, who’s gonna say anything, soar up above the timber line for a refreshing dollop of mountain chill, and then ride thermals until you spy the next snack. Life is good.
Exciting as it would be to lope around the boreal forest with your posse, or cavort naked in the watery deep, or soar the afternoon away in the Alps, um, I forget . . . why do we still want this aggravating, stiff, gravity-prone, worrisome human life?
For starters, we humans do not want to hold our breath all day or sleep in cold mud or on some wind-tossed sticks in a tree and mainly we do not want to wonder until we die where the next meal is coming from. We would like to have a well-stocked larder, plus a few weeks off every now and then for levity or gravity or whatever the hell we want, and what we clearly do not want is to hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, every day of the month every month of our lives until we become somebody else’s dinner or just up and buy the farm.
The crazy thing with our brains, well, one of many, is that we can imagine the freedom of the porpoise, wolf, and eagle. Our brains can do this. We can long for another life.
This is astounding, that we can conceive of another kind of life and long for it.
Longing. Desire. Call it the surpassing urge. We want to be more than we are. Maybe every single person does not have this urge, but we have it as a species. We can imagine, and we can feel other lives. We yearn for betterment, and the transcendent moments we cherish impel us to reach beyond and beyond.
The emotions. If little you were a solar system, the emotions would be the sun. The fire at the core. The heat, the engine, that propels the vast, complex juggernaut of you to engage in life.
However, it gets sticky, this business of managing a human life: just because you have an emotion doesn’t mean that said emotion has value. Yet the emotions are so powerful that each and every one demands all your attention. But no. While a powerful emotional core is the engine of a robust life, each separate emotional reaction may or may not have any value at all. Some are utterly useless, or worse than useless, and get in the way of living well. Such as getting your little feelings hurt. Such as not getting enough attention. Such as road rage. Is it worth killing or dying because of your unfortunate position in a line of cars? Not if you have more to live for than your position in a line of cars, which, ideally, you do.
Emotions, as rich and wonderful and vital as they are, cannot be relied upon by themselves to provide a rich and rewarding life. Emotions, left to their own propensities, do not delay gratification. They want what they want now, meaning RIGHT NOW, and while this urgency can confer blissful results, it can also get you or them killed.
Riding the emotions into life without any training would be like hopping unannounced on a wild stallion. The ride will be memorable, but it won’t last long and it won’t end well.
So much for “living in the moment.”
The goal here would be to “live in the moment” judiciously enough so that you may enjoy many more moments well after the emotional impulse/moment in question has dissolved into its essential nothingness. Such a long term goal—outliving the emotion of the moment—calls for training, judgment, experience, and tempering—just as stallions are a lot more fun when they get used to bridles, saddles, reins, and crap like that. You, too, are a lot more fun when all your horsepower is reined in and well-directed.
And by the way, the division of emotions into “positive” and “negative” is a false dichotomy. Fear, for example, is generally classified as a negative emotion. But if you don’t conserve a healthy dose of fear when driving a car (while managing road rage), your attention wanders off the road and your ride is likely to end before it is complete. Anger is even more complicated. Often, anger is misplaced, and, oy, some people find the riveting energy of anger addicting. However, a healthy dose of anger can be appropriate when protecting one’s interests. The full range of emotions, from joy to sorrow to trust and love and yearning all have value when intelligently applied to the situation at hand.
Suffice it to say, though, that your life tends to be a lot more rewarding and fun when conducted so that your engagements produce tons more joy than anger. (Joy weighs less than anger, so the comparative mathematics get knotty.)
Which brings us to other parts of these amazing brains we’ve been born into. Yup, you gotta use your brain to navigate here, and simultaneously let your brain get out of the way.
If you’re opting for the optimal life, as most people would say they are, then integration between the emotions and the intellect and the body is required. Successful integration takes time and practice and desire, and some ability to see in the dark . . . that is, to find the way through your own nervous system. It gets dark in there. But the path can be found.
The mind is a terrible thing to manage. Or, more accurately, the mind is a terrible thing to manage when you’re not managing it, but it can become quite the nice ride through the time/space/life/love amalgamation when the juggernaut of you functions harmoniously.
This is not a How To or How Not To Do It treatise. It’s an assessment of the management challenge. And you’re doing great, so don’t worry. Too much. Worry a little. Worry a little every day. It burns calories.
Before we wrap it up and get on with our messy lives, just a couple of things here.
Well, three to be exact. The emotions. The mind. The body. We want them to work and play well together.
The body is the oldest of the three, so consider that it offers some basic lessons to the two younger, less experienced dimensions. Take the example of how the body processes a lot of material every day. It makes the most of the good stuff and tosses what’s useless. This defecation function might not smell great, but it is a beautiful function in the big picture and we now pause to applaud it!!! Woo-hoo!!!
Here’s hoping that the mind and emotions learn to defecate every day as well. Yes, you can do this: keep the nourishing emotions and let them enrich your time/space/life/love amalgamation. And throw the rest of the shit out. Same with the mind. If a thought has value, let it channel new thought, and throw the rest of the shit out: just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s worth thinking.
Such fundamental dumping procedures are not the final step in this management process but the beginning. So that new sightlines, new clarity, new connections become possible . . .
Which brings us back the wolf. Porpoise. Eagle. Lope. Swim. Soar. You can do this. Just not like they do it. You can do it in your own way, on your own found path . . . because the mind is a beautiful, wonderful, uniquely faceted thing to manage.
