Balancing Reason and Passion

They sometimes cooperate, they sometimes conflict. It is this duality of the human that gives it an advantage over other creatures. Able to tap into the drives of emotionality and then to direct that flow within the tight reins of the intellect, the human has not only shaped its outer world but also its own.

Sometimes, however, one of these two facets may override the other. A person who is highly driven by emotions is unstable, uncontrollable, even dangerous. He lets blind passion rule his life; sans the guiding hand of cool reason, this version of the human often runs into barriers of his own creation.

Conversely, a person who keeps his emotions bottled and repressed may find himself in no better shape than his polar opposite. Emotions exist within us for a reason, they exist within us because they have uses. Without the driving force of passion, the overly intellectual human finds himself deprived not only of a valuable resource but also the source of motivation.

There is, of course, a balance between these two forces. A medium.

Passion must never be bottled up, never repressed. This does not mean that it must always be followed, nor must it always be shown. Anger can be felt but never acted upon; it can be used to drive the self into an action later, still motivated by the smoldering character of that particular emotion. Cold reason mixes with hot emotion to produce a lukewarm awareness of what must be done.

There is no other emotion that requires simultaneous control and release than love, and its cousin lust. Allowed to run freely on its own passion, love and especially lust can destroy lives, or at the very least bring it great pain. It blinds the self, brings it closer to the precipice of sanity greater than any other emotion. Tempered with intellect, love is tethered, held back, prolonged - and all avenues are explored by the mind with which to attain the individual deemed worthy of love.

At the same time, even as one controls emotion, one must also control reason. For life is, at least in this writer's opinion, not a mere progression of achievements, not a race to the finish, no ultimate winners or losers. It is in the enjoyment of life itself, the ability to taste and savor both the negatives and the positives that ultimately make life worth living. When too tight a rein is given to emotion, life stagnates, becomes bland, grays out, and the human in question becomes no different from a robot.

In the end, it is the balancing of these two facets, the combination of the hot and the cold that ensures a temperate existence.