Notes to Myself

"My power is in my willingness to be conscious
to be seen
to be emphatically myself.
I may lose a job, a friend, or my reputation
But I lose everything I am when I fail to act from what is at the core of me"

- Hugh Prather

Just a Thought: Nine

A benevolent dictator is nothing but a figment of my imagination.

The Emotion of Emotions

One of the interesting paradoxes of life is emotions and detachment. Humans are very complex and what makes them interesting is the varied emotions that they exhibit. Life would be incomplete without feeling the highs and lows of love, without spending some sleepless nights in anxiety, crying over unmet expectations, living and reliving dreams, turning green with jealousy, carrying an attitude for no reason and the list is endless.

However, apart from making our lives colorful, emotions also end up making us attached to things and people and this attachment brings with it pain and sorrow. It clouds reason and gives us that unique quality of being unreasonable, bringing excitement and unpredictability to our lives. There are times when this unreasonableness encourages us to denounce the various colors of life and take the spiritual path of detachment. We try to reduce the effects of emotions on our lives, try to be reasonable, objective and logical and not get too carried away by what our heart says or feels.

This is where I feel the paradox steps in. By being so “detached”, we reduce our pain caused by various emotions, but in turn hurt a lot of people around us, especially the ones who are closest to us. The pain and hurt just gets transferred. It’s like energy which can be only transferred not destroyed.

This is where we have to take a decision. The decision of walking the road with someone or standing alone at the fag end of it.