Emotion vs. Logic

I have always viewed myself as an emotional person, ask anyone around me and they will agree. As a child and young adult I only had an emotional response to any situation. I had soft emotions like feeling all tingly when watching something pretty, falling in love or eating something nice and hard emotions like overwhelming fear, anger for being misunderstood, sheer panic and even hate. I resented logical people, saw them as unreal and could not understand or deal with their logic.

But over the years I have seen myself change through all kinds of meditation and other ways of becoming more aware. I have witnessed myself get all tangled up in emotions and discovered that fear has many faces and functions, and discovered that emotions aren’t as pure as I thought they were.

I picture emotions like a water well; where it come to the service the water is all clear and pure, as its starts to flow, slowly all kinds of debris get into the water, things from long ago, like fear and pain. Pretty soon it is no longer clear what came from the source and what is added. For me meditation gave me tools to filter out the “add-ons”

In the period when my dad slowly lost his mind to Alzheimer, being able to “filter” was crucial. In the first few years no one knew what was happening and it caused a lot of confusion and even more emotions. My dad’s fear came out as anger, my mom’s fear came out in panic and tears, my brother fear came out as detachment and mine came out as filtering everything and becoming very logical.

Over a period of seven years big decisions had to be made, daycare, nursing home, hospitals, morphine-drips, casket, funeral. In that period I filtered the emotions from everyone involved and tried to figure out what the source was, what are our options, how to balance everything out and help make logical decisions. Being the youngest off the bunch it wasn’t easy and a lot of unfiltered emotions came my way. Recently we looked back on that period, my mum confessed that she leaned heavy on my logic and my brother told me he had hated me for being the stronger one and I had to confessed that I wasn’t that confident at all, that I had felt alone and afraid but I just knew someone had to step away from getting all tangled up by emotion, it just happened to be me.

I still see myself as an emotional person but my resentment to logic has disappeared. In having seen both sides now, I know that as emotions can get all tangled up and filed with debris so logic can get all cluttered with theories and opinions.

Emotions are scary things when you are confronted with only the add-ons and its manipulations, same as logic is dangerous when it is all cluttered and full of opinions and judgment.

Emotions are something to admire as a thing of beauty when they are raw but pure, the same admiration I have for logic when it is pure and without judgment.

It made me wonder; when we strip emotion from the debris and we strip logic from the judgment will we find they come from the same source?