Reason and Passion
It seems like nearly every internal conflict I have is rooted, at the heart, in the question of being ruled by my head or my heart. I suspect this is true for most people, that everyone struggles with the idea of whether they make their decisions based on logic or emotion.
I’m something of a junkie when it comes to personality tests. One I’ve taken a few times consists of a series of either-or questions designed to measure your preference for being introverted versus extroverted, for considering issue or taking action, and so on. I remember a few of the questions from this test distinctly. The first one said something like:
I am more likely to be swayed by:
a) A heartfelt appeal
b) Sound reasoning
I selected B—I’ve always considered myself more of a thinker than a feeler. But one of the other items read:
It is better to be
a) Just
b) Merciful
Again, I selected B. I didn’t think about it until later, but I realized when I considered it that there’s obviously an inconsistency there. Why is it that I’m swayed by sound reasoning but find mercy to be more important that justice? Clearly, mercy is motivated by emotion to the exclusion of logic. It is a passionate reaction, not a reasoned one.
This led me to the real question: How do I weigh reason and passion in my life? Which is really more important to me? Which SHOULD be more important to me? The quick answer to these questions is that it’s important to strike a balance between the two, that they cannot exist in a vacuum.
Not much of an answer, is it? The kind of thing you’d expect to see in Reader’s Digest or something, at best. Obviously, this isn’t a solution. We can do better.
Let’s start by figuring out what we mean by Reason and Passion in the first place. There are whole volumes dedicated to the subject, but we can condense them into two simple questions. When we address an issue using Reason, we’re really asking, “Does it work?” When we apply Passion, we’re asking, “Does it matter?” In order to meet our goals, we have to use reason. To decide what our goals are, we need passion.
As an example, consider a man getting ready to take a trip in a sailboat. There are a number of things he might be doing—checking the lines, consulting a chart, doing a happy jig because he’s going out on his boat for the first time all summer. Reason is what motivates him to check his gear and plot a course. Passion is what makes him get on the boat in the first place.
Without reason, we’ll get lost on our journey. We will end up off-course, hurt, and possibly destroyed. But without passion, we’ll never cast off the lines.
So the real question isn’t “Which is more important?” but rather, “Which one do I need to work on more?” Make no mistake; there is certainly one that comes easier to you. We all need to cultivate the area that’s our weakness.
And it can be cultivated. Many people argue that Reason can be taught, while Passion either exists or it doesn’t. These many people are wrong. Yes, Reason can be taught—to anyone, using any number of techniques. But Passion, too, can be taught, in a manner of speaking. What’s being taught here isn’t how to have Passion, because it is there in all of us. Rather, what some of us need to be taught is how to uncover that Passion in our hearts. Once we find that reason for leaving the docks, our skill for navigation can take over.
Once you figure out which area you are deficient in, what can be done to improve it? Let’s look at cultivating Reason first.
To pursue a path of Reason is to think critically, to analyze a situation and determine the most likely result. There are a number of possibilities for improving your skill in this area. Possible suggestions range from taking a formal Logic class if you’re in a situation where that’s a viable option, to picking up a few books from your local library. Consider something that focuses on the scientific method for a starting point. You won’t find a subject that outlines an ordered way of thinking than that.
Maybe you’re not the type to get a lot out of that kind of reading. If that’s the case, don’t be alarmed. Humans tend to remember only about 20% of what they read, anyway. One area you might explore is playing games. One thing that all games have in common is a sense for strategy. Chess may be the best example, but almost anything will do. Once you understand the rules of the game, it becomes based on cause and effect. IF I move the pawn here or throw down the Jack of spades or put an X in the middle square, THIS is likely to happen. Play with someone who’s willing to teach you, and most importantly, someone who’s better at the game than you are. Nothing makes you improve faster than being challenged.
What these games can do is put you in a frame of mind to consider things from a purely rational standpoint. You’ll find that you can start equating other situations to what happens in the game. If I take this new job, I’ll develop new skills, which may lead to additional opportunities in the future. If I wait until Sunday to do my grocery shopping, I’ll be rushed and less likely to shop for bargains. Eventually, you’ll find that you’re able to break down more and more complex situations into manageable pieces, and get where you want to go.
Now, what about the other side of the coin? What if it’s uncovering your passion that’s your weakness? Let me first say, I can relate. I’ve come to realize that this is the area of my self that needs the most work. I’ve spent a lot of time honing and practicing my reason, setting my course and checking my calculations, without spending equal time figuring out why I was going in that direction in the first place.
There’s one lesson I’ve learned, at least, and I urge you to learn it from my experience rather than your own. That lesson is this: You cannot count on someone else to provide your passion for you. Imagine a friend or your partner telling you, “I don’t need to know how to read myself. You can do that for me.” You’d be stunned, and angry, and rightly so. It is not your role in life to do someone’s thinking for them. Yet this is exactly what you’re doing when you expect someone else to allow you to make their passions your own. For some reason, doing exactly this seems to be a popular idea, one that crops up in movies and stories from time to time, when one person says to the other, “My dream is to make your dreams come true.” It sounds wonderfully selfless, and romantic, and beautiful. It also doesn’t work. What you’re really doing is taking that person’s ideals, their dreams, the things that truly make them uniquely who they are, and taking them for yourself. You’re saying, “I can’t be bothered to find my own loves, my own motivations. I’ll just steal yours.” Just as you can’t do all the thinking for someone else, you cannot expect him or her to do your feeling for you. It’s exhausting and impossible and it is, truly, a violation. Again, I strongly suggest you trust me on this one.
So what can you do? Here’s where any answers become much less complete. I can tell you what I’ve tried, what’s started to work for me. Its applicability to your own life is something you’ll have to judge for yourself.
I think discovering passion is in many ways a matter of forming new habits. Remember those questions about reason and passion? For me, the first step was to stop asking “Does it work?” and start asking, “Does it matter?” And to ask it often, about even the most trivial of things. I’d been in the habit of choosing what to do against a measuring stick that wasn’t my own. This habit cropped up in a lot of ways, from deciding where to go for dinner to whether to move to a new state or change jobs. Asking myself, “Does it matter?” was an awakening, because I discovered that to my surprise that many of the things I’d forced others to define did matter to me. I felt passionately about things I’d told myself didn’t matter.
It’s a matter of cultivating that passion, too. That means you have to try new things, and try them solely because they’re important to you. And when you’re trying those things, ask yourself again, “Does it matter?” If it doesn’t, stop doing it.
Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity has helped me in this. I picked it up when I realized I hadn’t written anything I found interesting in almost a year. Even if your passions don’t lie in the area of creativity, some of the exercises in the book may be helpful to you.
One of the hardest things for me has been to accept the idea that my passions have value outside what anyone else thinks about them. They may seem trivial to others, or they may seem noble and poetic. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The things that are important to you are valuable solely because of how they make you feel. I’ve challenged myself to get to the top rung of my Bite Me ladder where my passions are concerned (See the essay The Joys of the Bite Me Philosophy for an explanation of what the heck I’m talking about here). If they’re trivial even to the people I care about most, they’re valuable to me, and that’s the thing that matters.
One of the things I’ve discovered, or rediscovered, is how important it is for me to put my thoughts down on paper. Not because I expect they’ll resonate with everyone the way they do with me, but because the people in my life I’ve admired most are the ones who put their ideas out there for others to see. They’re unflinching in their conviction that their ideas have merit. I have always wanted to feel the same respect for myself as I do for those brave souls. So this poorly-designed website is something I’m passionate about, because the thoughts I post here are parts of myself that are valuable to me.
In the end, I think we’re all setting sail, looking for a place to go and a way to get there. It’s only by having our own instruments to navigate by and our own reasons for casting off that our journey can be a successful one. By uncovering both aspects of our inner sailor, we may find that each journey leads us to new discoveries, new adventures, and new paths to explore.
8 July 2001