One of the recurring themes here lately, due to events inside and outside my control, is thoughts. I guess I'm a fairly thoughtful person, but mostly because I think a lot and not because I am very considerate of other people. I can be, and I think that can be maddening to some folks who deal with me on a daily basis. I just often get preoccupied with other thoughts and kind of forget where I am, get lost in the moment, maybe? Space out, more likely.
I often find myself in peculiar situations because not only do I think a lot, I tend to think out loud as I do. When my cats are my sole audience it's just a crazy man in the garage, but when there's other people around and I do this, it can be very distracting to their thoughts. Or so I'd imagine, but that's a big part of why I think out loud. I want to elicit other's thoughts about whatever it is that is occupying mine. It's always nice to have a second opinion on things but it can probably be quite a distraction. I think it's overall a better situation to drag random strangers into your love life than to just stand there and stare at clouds for a while as you deliberate silently.
I'm sure there's a happy medium somewhere, but sometimes there are thoughts so persistent and pressing that you just have to deal with them immediately. The alternative, keeping them down and unthought, is appalling. It's also a recipe for madness because those thoughts eventually need to come out and if not now, they might at some other less opportune moment. I'm aware not everyone is quite as impulsive as I am with my thoughts, but they're not quite as impulsive with their emotions either.
Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese professor mostly responsible for coming up with the "somatic marker hypothesis" which is basically a theory that says our cognitive and emotional processes are impossibly intertwined. When we make decisions, we like to think that this is just a thought process. We think about the pros and the cons and then make a decision accordingly. Sometimes though, the decision is just a bit too hard. There's maybe a few too many variables and we leave it up to chance or talk it out with someone and come up with a decision, or sometimes we make no decision which is itself a decision, I think there was a Rush song about it, in fact. These have consequences and those shape our future decision making because they elicit emotions the next time you have a similar conundrum of conscience and can't decide. If you flip a coin for a hard decision and it works every time, does it actually work every time or do you just feel good about the consequences of a difficult decision?
Damasio had the following to say:
"Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.
I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.
We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.
Having a self, even a simple self, allows you to look into the world and put a mark over what is more important and less important. It's a way of classifying the world in terms of your own needs.
When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.
Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation.
To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes."
You can probably see the feedback loop inherent in this kind of thing. We make a hard decision and our emotions help us to make it this time and the next. The coin flip is just something to take the blame away from yourself, if you chose that. Or, whenever I say something like "let Jesus take the wheel" as I put my hands over the driver's eyes. I'm the one taking or not taking the action and anything else in the way just obfuscates the fact that it was a hard decision ultimately made with emotions and not reason.
Once you do that a few times, you start to feel better about it. If you do something a few thousand times, it becomes part of your nature. If you start by making small decisions based on emotions, you'll eventually make more until it's all so mixed up it's impossible to separate. Over the years, I've taught myself to make certain decisions based solely on emotions. Some you can re-teach yourself.
One of the decision making processes this is particularly interesting with is risky behavior. All those questionable nights makes me question. People describe the behavior as impulsive, if they're being polite, but it's risky business. It's also a lot of fun and the reason I say that and I think that is because I've taught myself that it's fun. The risk associated or whatever, the danger, is enticing. When I was younger I found myself doing "bad" things just because I wasn't allowed. Then I found myself doing those same things when I got older because I remembered the fun I had. Now I look back on some stuff and I think, "Damn, I'm getting older?" I also think that it's important to acknowledge the subtle difference between destructive and fun.
Alcoholics are a perfect example of this because everyone knows alcohol is bad for you. You start off making an emotional decision to imbibe what is literally a toxin. However, it feels good so you do it again and again. Or you don't because it makes you sick. Or maybe it made you sick, like me, and you didn't care and you just powered through until it didn't anymore. In your mind, this entire time, you know this is bad but it feels good and it's not that bad. Maybe it never will be that bad, but maybe one day it will be and then it's possible to have developed a physical dependency fueled by an emotional decision you cognitively knew was bad but you now are forced to continue because quitting might kill you. One of the issues with severe alcoholics detoxing is that the withdrawal can kill if they've essentially pickled themselves or have organ issues. It's possible to reinforce your decision making ability so far that it can kill you if you stop.
This isn't just an emotional and thought process issue either. Because our brains can re-wire themselves, this can become a physical issue in your brain, as well. Over time, the parts of your brain associated with these decisions that make you feel better or worse essentially become stronger because they're used more. You become more comfortable with using those parts of your brain and those feelings and the results of your decisions. You can literally feedback loop yourself into anything you'd like if you have enough willpower and self-destructive attitude. Or, if you have some deficiency of thought or sufficiently strong desire.
This is pretty self-evident, when you look at it. Everyone knows thoughts and emotions can be intertwined, but the take-away here is the fact that you can never separate them. I don't know if that's even a bad thing. Knowing that our decisions today effect those that we make tomorrow can be quite hopeful. It means that you can lead the life you'd like so long as you continue to pursue it. Reinforcing the decisions made properly today will lead to easier properly made decisions in the future. When you're so used to doing things one way through habit and emotion and sheer impulse, it takes a lot of convincing to do something different. It takes even more convincing to do the same thing you did in the past but for different reasons this time. So, sometimes when I'm thinking out loud, spacing out, or just admiring the beauty of nature for, like way too long, maybe I'm just trying to suss out how to be a better person.
This is why we need to live in the moment. Our moments are what make the future. If we're doing the things we should now then it will lead to what you need in the future, not what you think you want. Before you can be of any use to anyone else or society at large, you should be of use to yourself. When the airplane is going down, you need to mask yourself up first. If you run out of oxygen you can't help anyone else. Being conscious of our emotions' effects on our decisions and just trying your best everyday to be better will eventually pay off, regardless of some of the stumbling blocks you may come across in the way.
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