Adam Leonard
Life guide
We all want to know where we are going and what we are supposed to be doing. Thinking about it however, will always lead us to a dead end. Intellect is something that is becoming greatly over used. Society seems to feel that if you think about something for long enough you will find the answer. This maybe true for things like riddles, cross words and even quantum mechanics but it can never lead to answering someone’s personal direction in life. There is something that has perplexed me for years – the purpose of emotion. It seems to lead to pain, corruption, rape, abuse, greed and all sorts of sordid activities. I often took the mickey out of scenes in movies where a group of people desperately needed to leap across a gorge to safety or die at the hands of a savage beast. One member of the group (usually the strategically placed pretty blonde female) becomes too scared to jump. The rest of the group try to convince her, by the time she is ready, they are all being maimed to death. It seemed to me that emotion tends to get in the way of everything rather like an annoying flaw that human beings have to keep in check to move forward in life.
The thing is that I was being too logical. Moving forward in life is not about achieving goals, ironically, moving forward is yet again a linear start to finish goal created by logic itself. We are all driven by a common goal – something called “Happiness”. Emotional impulses correctly followed eventually lead to happiness. Emotion however, feels what it feels no matter what the correct course of action is and will often conflict with the mind. The mind saying to the emotional impulse- “Following this emotion will not lead you to your desired goal.” (Happiness) Do any of us actually really know 100% where following that goal will lead? No we don’t, we are logically calculating it from past experiences.
What makes us happy however, is in most cases, something our mind has no idea about. The only thing our mind knows is what has made us happy in the past. The most annoying thing about emotion is that it never stays in the same place for too long. When we don’t find the thing we found last time enjoyable we are made to believe that something must be wrong with us or that we must be doing it wrong. The simple fact is, that your soul has learnt what it was supposed to be learning and now requires a new experience. No amount of rethinking or reworking will make you feel any different, you cannot control emotional experience. We can never know what our purpose in life is all about but what we do know is what we feel and where it is pulling us. All we need to do is follow that urge and let life unfold the rest for us. Its not complicated or difficult to work out. It’s only us that complicates things. Its not emotion that must be put in place, it’s our own thoughts. If we all did this, humanity would be much happier and would have no need to destroy each other or the world we live on.
Adam
Anne Scholes
Laurence Gibson