A short-lived mediation on emotions

For those of you out there who are considering starting your own blog of sorts, but feel that you are lacking in inspiration, I always find that these quirky little facebook motivation quotes seem to be a sound and firm starting point. Not only are you constantly bombarded with these picture phrases, but if you're like me, you usually have a guilty pleasure in searching them up yourself, and will eventually come to realise that you’ve joined all these ridiculous page titles when you were a kid. Exhibition A for example: https://www.facebook.com/events/1466704096953408/

Browsing through my facebook homepage, one of my friend’s reposted a ‘picture of the day quote’ that read as follows: “ never make a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.”

When I first saw this, I immediately liked it. I thought; YES sometimes we’re too hasteful to make life-changing decisions based on fleeting emotions [insert here all the things you regret doing and have resigned to blaming them on a moment of ‘euphoria’] However the more I pondered on it, the more it became apparent to me that every emotion, by their nature, is temporary.

Now glossing through a dictionary definition does not particularly clarify this dilemma, being defined as an “instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.” Perhaps the definition as “a strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others” is a more apt definition, as it does all really depend on the situation and current circumstances.

We are never in one state of being, and therefore it goes without saying that neither are our emotions ever stationary. So how can we ever make permanent decisions based on our temporary emotions? The simplest (and probably most unhelpful answer) is that we can’t. Time and memory will inevitably alter our perceptions of our decisions, but we just have to have the confidence in ourselves that in the moment of that particular decision, we had made the right one.

  

And I guess this whole discussion regresses back to my previous blog post about the purpose and nature of words and the meanings, we as humans, attribute to them. I know some of you will think I’m being melodramatic-and the chances are that I probably am- and okay we all feel this unconditional love for our parents, but does this feeling really fit into the category of emotion? It’s something passive (not in the neglected sense) and underlying, not something at the forefront of your thoughts. But is that to say that emotions must always be heart racing and thoroughly felt?

I simply do not know.