What good do emotions cause? I was interested in thinking about why they exist and why people who show emotion are considered sensitive and people who hide their emotions are considered heartless.  By most peoples standards I am one of the most insensitive people around. What do emotions prove? Do they demonstrate our humanity or are they the characteristic that causes the majority of poor decisions? I have seen more people make bad choices because of emotions. Instead of thinking about what should logically happen in a given situation people reflect on regrettable circumstance and say ‘It felt right at the time’. In some cases people confuse impulses with emotion and blame one on the other when a bad decision is made. In my time I have seen a lot of poor decisions made and regretted more times when the decisions were based on how people felt about a situation rather than doing what they have been taught or even have experienced.

Which brings me to an interesting opportunity to suggest that emotions are the desire to experience even if we know how ‘the story goes’. In the book “Conversations with God” there is a passage that explains we all need to experience ourselves not to learn but to remember. As if we know the truth or the outcome of how things are and how they will be but need to experience to remember the things we have supposedly forgotten. This is an interesting point and would lead me to believe this is what emotions do for us. They take us to the point of wanting to experience things for ourselves even though we know and we have seen the results of ‘that’ path before. That path that has such an obvious outcome, but we push the limits of our emotions to risk the possibility of pain in search of pleasure.

I would call a master someone who controls their mind so completely that they engage in activities they consider emotionally challenging or potentially painful and resolve the situation to think of it as a good experience regardless of how the majority of people would be affected by it. Everyone would agree that experience of any outcome is ultimately good. Remember the phrase ‘We learn from our mistakes’? Most people I have known look back and learn a thing or two from their successes and failures alike. A master celebrates the success and the failure the same way immediately when they happen. Even though the success is instinctively or emotionally rewarding the master knows you can learn more from a mistake. In essence one gains more from a failure. Of course most people only learn from their failures after they feel sorry for themselves for a few days or even weeks. The fool never learns at all and repeats the mistake showing he/she didn’t take anything from their experience.

What about the people who are considered heartless or cold? Can we determine those people are missing the fruits of life because they fear or think about the situation at hand? From what was discussed earlier it would seem so. If emotion is an indication of wanting to experience beyond the possibility of injury to mind, body and soul would thought, which would usually keep you out of harms way, be the same as fearing life? If we don’t have experiences to live through, what are we doing in life? Are we merely spectators to the ones who are experiencing what they feel?

I have usually been the type of person who bases my decisions on what I have thought about. It can also be said that thinkers have a security in knowing how things will turn out. It is like a prediction. The thought isn’t so much a guess or risk as it is a statistic based on what we or someone else experienced in the past.

I think that what I have determined so far, at 4:00am in the morning, is the thinkers aren’t truly living. We think our way out of the experiences we would have had if we would have followed our heart. Thinkers want a sure thing. Thinkers try to predict what will happen from others experiences and not usually their own. If you agree with me about the greater the experiences the greater the life then you will know that there is a time to think and there is a time to live. Who is doing more of what? You can live or watch other people do what everyone was born to do. I said it earlier, that fear is to stop yourself from the experience. That experience is all we have to know that we live and then to find out if what we just experienced is what we were created for. How can we base our own entire lives on the results of other people? I hope you don’t think that because someone is a good golfer that you can be too or that if someone failed in the restaurant business that you will too. You might hate the game of golf and you might be great for the restaurant industry. The point is you will need to experience both in order to know. You will need to live as much as possible before you remember everything you were supposed to be doing all along.