To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
 
I was having a conversation with someone from the Psychology field and she told me this interesting effect whereby the state of a person’s being, say for example if they’re feeling tired, influences their ‘objective’ evaluation of characteristics of the environment, say for example, the incline of a hill. In short, the more tired I am the more I might overestimate the difficulty level of climbing the hill, which seemed pretty self-evident to me, but according to this friend, it wasn’t so much the ‘subjective’ perception she was talking about but the ‘objective’ estimate in that I would actually err in estimating an incline or distance if it relates to walking rather than simply finding it subjectively difficult to climb or walk if I was say for example tired. When I asked her how they would be able to tell if it was my subjective perception or my objective estimate that was at work in the judgement, she said that they would use techniques to get at the most objective estimate possible, though she admitted that this would be tough given that humans were usually pretty bad at this sort of estimation. I would agree because I think even if I am far from being tired I couldn’t tell the incline of a hill or the distance to the bus stop ;)

This made me think about a recent incident which is quite different overall but maybe one can see the similarity too. I was having a particularly strenuous and exhausting day—both physically and mentally. Basically I was on my real and figurative toes from sometime in the morning to sometime late in the evening; all I wanted to do was get home and crash on my comfortable bed. I don’t remember the last time I felt so mind-bogglingly tired but I think it might be because I am not used to it that it got me feeling much worse. So, almost when I was about to pack up, I happened to check my email and there was one that snapped something in me. It was a pretty business-like email but without going into specifics all I can say is that it was a bit of a bad news in a rather unfair sense. I am sure at any other time this email would have caught me off-guard and annoyed me too but catching me at a moment when I was completely physically exhausted and strained, it had something of an overwhelming effect on me. I almost felt tears in my eyes and numbed by the contents. I was consumed by rage and wanted to emotionally react to it though I guess I talked some sense into myself and diverted my ire in a more useful direction. Now that I think about the whole episode more calmly I realise, as in the case of the person judging the difficulty of climbing the hill when they are tired (subjectively speaking though), my physical and mental exhaustion contributed to the way I judged the email. This is not to say that the email did not demand any such reaction; a hill would be difficult to climb no matter how relaxed I am but my state of being increased the poignancy of my reaction. Perhaps if I had simply closed my mailbox and checked it the next day I would have said to myself that it was unfair but there was little I could do about it so let me just focus on what was in my control and get on with my day. Instead I chose to react and act in a very different way…

Makes one wonder about decisions in general… how different would they be if made on a different day or made when one’s state of being was quite different?

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 12:14 am 0 comments
HOME