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
Monday, July 06, 2020
 
As usual a random thought caught hold of me today. I wondered why when I was much younger I was intent on sorting out my emotional life; it is pretty clear to me now that my intellectual life is where it's at for me, so why? Did I consider my emotional life to be more important when I was younger? What made me want to prioritise it then? The answer came to me in an analogy.

I think even when I was very young I was a fan of ideas and ideals. I thought of emotions and the life of emotions as presenting something of an Achilles' heel for me. My personality nor my interests lend toward living out the emotional life that most humans especially the female kind take for granted almost from the cradle onwards. But there are no alternative lives equally valid or granted by society. So I guess I thought that I would first fix my Achilles’ heel, and having done so, I would be free to pursue the life of my dreams. Pursue the life of the mind so to speak. Naively, I never questioned if an emotional life would be compatible with an intellectual life, but what alternative did one have?

The emotional life didn’t materialise. But now I realise that the Achilles’ heel wasn’t there to be fixed or taken care of but to signal to me that the life of my choosing carried this inherent burden. That I would have to live with it. If it could have been simply dealt with, it would not have been an Achilles’ heel. Now that I have fully embraced the intellectual life I realise that the Achilles’ heel, an externalisation of my internal nature, is something I could never have cut off as if it was an extra limb. The removing of it would have caused more pain than the living with it because I wouldn’t be fulfilling the destiny that the heel brought to its owner… it is not a smooth destiny but there is peace and acceptance in it… and who knows… emotional fulfilment may even find its way where there are these things…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:33 am 0 comments
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