Containing Our Incredulity

We will see—and indeed, some of us have seen—some amazing and awesome and terrible things. In moments of terror we must somehow remain calm, defeating the temptation to gawk, and therefore delay, at those things happening right before our eyes; those things defying, not our senses but, our expectations.

This is about getting our minds right. It’s about staying together and staying focused.

Let us go inside the incredulity.

Going Inside

It is vastly foreign to us, this place, and what is happening to us.

We haven’t perhaps in any way expected it, or at least not at this loaded magnitude or shrill proximity.

But, nonetheless, we are here; it may not seem so, yet it is. The mind can comprehend this better, and optimally only, when we negate the overly-emotive heart. It’s too early for the heart just yet. If we let the heart through this door of our consciousness now, we bear it and it’s too much a load to bear just now, with all of what else’s going on otherwise. Undisciplined, it interferes with responsive calculations.

We must save ourselves and our thought for logic. It’s safety that has highest and sole precedence.

A Clear Pathway for Logical Thinking

Logic must grace the freeway at peak-hour with a dedicated lane all its own if possible. It alone, therefore, attends to this full priority situation without encumbrance, free to think and act in accordance with what it senses.

To attend to our own desires or fumbling emotions in urgent moments is a gross luxury none can afford to indulge in, lest a cavalcade of regret festoon its way with calamitous power into our lives afterward.

A Colluding Irony

There is a golden paradox, now, that makes its introduction.

There’s nothing quite like the legislative logical mind under the charge of a harnessed emotive mind—the logical mind directing the body, but the harnessed emotion commanding the overall effort, but to add to the complexity, only in dependence to the logical mind. The emotive mind is a servant leader—obeying the need to command, and commanding then only. It acts for the logical mind and not apart.

The logical mind and the harnessed emotive mind, then, dually report and account to each other in a beautiful interdependence made famous and subservient to the other.

What All the Foregoing Actually Means

When we’re faced with very dire circumstances in life we’re quite normally at odds in how to respond. Dissonance becomes us. Sometimes we lose composure and we react emotionally. At other times, however, we respond in an unsurpassing calmness that we hardly understand. We implicitly know we have to hold it together. And we do.

The abovementioned analysis is based in getting to the latter position of calmness in tumult. If we reflect on situations where the latter characterised our response it might make more sense.

Emergencies are no place for the intrusions of the emotions that must come later in the process so as to attach healthy meaning to the event and what we’ve ‘become’ due to it.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.