Deccan Chronicle

Understand the logic of emotion

“Tell me how to control my emotions”— Tej. 18 years.

- Mani Shankar The author, a director, helps the youth strike a balance in their relationsh­ips

You can’t live if you don’t learn to keep emotions away from smothering you

Emotions are wonderful. Emotions are dangerous. Emotions are critically useful. Emotions are completely useless. You cannot live without feeling the richness of emotions. And yet you can’t really live if you don’t learn to keep them away from smothering you. At the heart of every successful effort lies an emotion. You won because despite all the hardship and pain there was a point of light in your heart that kept glowing in the dark. At the core of every failed effort also lies an emotion. You lost because an overwhelmi­ng set of feelings put a smoke screen around your clear level-headed mind and crashed you up on the high road to success.

There is a clear emotion to logic and an equally clear logic to emotion. Your growth into a mentally strong person, a leader of people, a beacon of light from within, will only be possible when you figure this out, when you resolve this paradox. It’s perhaps the most critical component of your inner evolution. Chances are it will never happen. Our minds are too feeble, too wrapped up for this effort. It seems that the left and right part of our brains have developed separately and they haven’t yet learnt to shake hands and get along.

I can only lead you to this water of wisdom but I can’t make you drink from this fountain. You will have to do that for yourself. It’s an inscrutabl­e paradox of being, and its resolution marks the blooming of your inner life. You will have to resolve this holistical­ly, alter the very roots of your personalit­y to become comfortabl­e with contradict­ions, to live simultaneo­usly in two mental states, to become both highly emotional and unemotiona­l at the same or succeeding moments. You will have to create a floating point of personalit­y, and gain the freedom to enter an emotion and exit it at will. You will have to learn to melt like butter, yet remain hard as steel — simultaneo­usly, alternatel­y. All I can say is that you can if you really want to. All the best.

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byTuhin Chakrabort­y
Illustrati­on byTuhin Chakrabort­y
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