Emotion Syntopicon
Alana Riddle
Philosophy-8
25 September 2009
Let It Be
At some point in your life, you have made a stupid decision due to emotions having overshadowed any sense of reason. Anger, frustration, betrayal; all of these are emotions that can lead to utter irrationality when they are left in the hands of people who are not willing to accept the rightful place of reason in stressful situations. Although emotion is what gives us soul, it can and will be detrimental to our logic when is becomes excessive.
When you are truly upset, the trauma that accompanies any unfortunate event proves itself to be both mentally exhausting and surprisingly physically painful. Such intense feelings may lead one to rush into things, neglecting any potential consequences of his or her decisions. “An emotion is suggested,” Robert Smithson once said, “and demolished in one glance by certain words.” These quick bursts of pain or confusion, although they are seemingly far more powerful than reason in any situation, will come and go in time, much unlike the common sense we as humans must maintain.
The truth hurts. Coping with troubling emotions is difficult, and I am in no place to deny that I have let my emotions get the best of me on more than one occasion. Through personal experience in the field of high school romance and heartbreak, it can be concluded that the right thing may be, and almost always is, the hardest thing to do. This struggle between emotion and logic is described perfectly by George Savile: “Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.” Accepting the honest and right thing to do is often extremely hard, but it is necessary for each and every one of us to come to terms with the imbalance of the world and the sense we make of it.
We will not always get what we want, it is a simple fact of life. What we want may be temporarily achieved by means of emotion, but what we need will always lie in our sense of rationality and good judgment....
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