I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions. However, after 2007, this year I made an exception. This year, I resolved to have 25% fewer feelings about everything.
Maybe that sounds stupid, or weird, or doomed, but I meant well. I had been flattened by my own impassioned, powerful reactions to things to the point where I made a very conscious decision to get brutally rational about everything. And when I did get brutally rational about myself, I had no shortage of theories–some lame, some not. I had a handful of major revelations about some of my ill-advised choices, and the frequency with which I made those choices decreased. My assumption was this would bring enormous improvements to my life on a bunch of different fronts, as the result of conscious effort, and good for me, right?
Riiiiiiiiiight. Absolutely. Do you want to know how many feelings I have had about things, compared to before? Yeah, it’s about the same. Because no matter how ’smart’ you get, and no matter how hard you try to give your life rules, there are still going to be things that happen which aren’t going to entirely make sense. Being ’smart’ doesn’t really mean having fewer feelings about everything, it means tempering them with a little perspective. When you lose your perspective, that’s when things can get pretty sketchy…
