Thoughts, Decisions & Feelings

Earlier this week I needed to take a right turn up a country road that takes me home (queue the music). Keeping in mind we drive on the left here in currently sun kissed Ireland, that meant I had to cut across traffic. Normally that might involve avoiding a sporadic car driving too fast around the oncoming bends, but on this occasion there was relative gridlock because of a slow moving farm vehicle stacked high with something wrapped in plastic (I live in the country, I’m not a country boy – like John Denver for instance – even though he was in fact an army brat and not a farmer’s son).

A very nice young woman decided not to continue in the funereal procession and stop to let me through. Commendable you might say and you’d be right as far as the kindness was concerned. However she was on a very bad bend and crazily the speed limit up to that bend is 80kph. Luckily the car coming behind her was slow enough to stop and rather than contribute to the danger I nipped across the road and proceeded on my way.

When I got home I couldn’t help thinking about how sometimes good intentions can be deadly when not combined with common sense, or even a little extra thought.

Coincidentally, if you believe in that sort of thing, I was listening to a podcast and reading a book this week and they both used road rage as an example to explain different aspects of Buddhist teaching*. Relax I’m not going to rehash either of those teachings because I don’t understand them enough, but you know how one thought leads to a thousand others? It made me think about ‘rage” and then “feelings” and then ‘thoughts” and then “decisions’; like the one the kind young woman made earlier.

FEELINGS

Well that heading has probably sent most of the male and a significant number of the female readers (if there were that many) diving for the off button. Face it some people just don’t like the subject all that much and to be fair I’m one of them, mostly. However, since I won’t be talking about my feelings I’m happy enough to soldier on.

You see despite being just one year away from being officially a ‘senior’, I never could work out where feelings and thoughts and decisions came in the scheme of things. If I thought about something important did it help me understand better how I feel about it, and then inform any decision I might make in relation to that thought? Or, given how many times I make a decision with practically no conscious thought and then think about the decision only after I felt I made a mistake; is that the correct order? So what is the correct way to line these three aspects up in order to make better decisions?

That made me wonder WWMSD (what would Mr Spock do?). I must admit I always aspired to be more like the famous fictional Vulcan (okay all Vulcans are fictional…Jeez) and try to use logic as my yardstick for decisions. Logical thought certainly helps, but not always, and those times when it doesn’t it’s usually because of how that decision makes me or someone else feel.

So I have made logical decisions that were good based on the facts but bad based on the feelings. So I was still lost. I’d have to give it all some more thought.

THOUGHTS

Ever hear someone being described as being very thoughtful? And that was depicted as a very high value personality trait. This usually follows on from that person deciding to do something nice for another person.

It’s hard to escape thoughts really. Even when you don’t know you’re thinking them!

After all most thoughtful people don’t actually set out to be thoughtful, they’re just like that, have a well-formed sense of empathy, and think a lot about how others feel or what they need. So the thinking about their actions is almost always on a sub-conscious level – the thoughts and actions just come naturally. So in this scenario thoughts are minor contributors, lagging behind empathic feelings and leading swiftly to decisions to act.

So is the decision the instigating element of the interaction between decisions, thoughts and feelings?

DECISIONS

We’ve all heard of people acting spontaneously, without any apparent thought going into the decision to act. In fact I would go out on a limb and say we’ve all done it at least once (how else would you explain my 1970s afro haircut? – not now, in the actual 1970s).

But aren’t most decisions like a recipe where we think about the ingredients and then cook the meal? And wouldn’t one of the essential ingredients of a good decision be how we and others might feel about the outcome? Having come to that conclusion it was only left for me to find out in which order the ingredients are added. In other words which comes first the chicken or the egg – thoughts or feelings?

THE EQUALISER

Sadly I’m not talking about Denzel, Latifah or even Woodward (ask your granny). I’m more thinking about an equalizer like you utilise to make it all about the base and have no treble. I’ll try to explain.

Eventually a bunch of very smart scientists designed a series of experiments using MRIs to watch the internal workings of the brain to finally work out which came first in the decision making process. And after much deliberation they discovered that feelings stimulate thoughts, and thoughts influence decisions.

Obviously some decisions require a lot of conscious thought ( or at least we give them lots of conscious thought) and others are given very little – think of all those things you used to have to consciously think about while you were doing them (like driving) until you gained unconscious competence and then the level of conscious thought declined.

Hence the equalizer, to cater for the different levels of interaction between feelings, thoughts and decisions, and in that order. So maybe Spock was faking it – devastated.

Of course the research was very valuable because it was done when we as a society still valued science (don’t even go there), but as I discovered while reading the book and listening to the podcast this week the Buddha had already begun to teach that same sequence two and a half thousand years ago, and without an MRI to be seen anywhere.