On Emotions

“’You’ve got to find what you love,’

“And most important, [you must] have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs, 2005

On the first day of Roots and Wings Seminar 1, I made the commitment to learn more about emotions. The commitment, unexpectedly, leads me to discover things that I thought that was not possible or that I knew but simply forgot amid the hassles and bustles of every day’s life. These guiding principles are often no so obvious to people at first glance, so easily missed by so many of us. Unfortunately, we are so in need of understanding these principles that we are often blinded without them only tragically not knowing what we missed and needed.

Emotions are truly complex. We are often told that we should be happy, that we should avoid being sad. These are completely not true. As a human being, we need all these experiences to form part of human being’s tapestry. We do need to those negative emotions to appreciate the positive emotions; there will be no positive if everything is positive. The problem lies in the fact that we see negative emotions to be something that will be always is with us no matter when we experience them, either yesterday or 10 years ago. Furthermore, we develop this complex, unrelenting relationship with the negative emotions – we internalize those negative emotions as our very own thoughts. Remember those cringe-worthy moments? I do too. And I would go one step further suspecting that we do not remember exactly how we felt at those moments but we for sure remembered how badly we think we had appeared in front of other people. That is not healthy emotionally and these are things that we often forgot.

Emotions does not only dictates how we feels about our lives but also do provide us with a sense of directions where we are going to become as we mature. These are things that I had learned while contemplating about emotions. In schools, we are not taught to pursue what you love, to let emotions guides you but to conform. Indeed, if we and our careers are all guided by negative emotions, we would all become evil scientists or crooked businessmen. So to avoid that, we stick to learning the same subjects in school, no matter we like them or not. But we did not ask ourselves what if our lives and careers are guided by positive emotions. To be fair, positive emotions are incredibly transient in nature; they come and go faster than you can sneeze. However, what if we put in the hours and efforts to regain our abilities to connect and heed our own emotional advice, to listen to what our emotions have to tell us? I believe that what Steve was trying to say by ‘follow your heart and intuition’. Indeed, we have to be friends with emotions once again, not feeding them prescription drugs to make both of us happy, but to kindle and learn to feel what we feel again, and not what we think we should feel. And I think that is a truly powerful thought.