Thinking & Feeling…or Feeling & Thinking, Part 1

Thinking & Feeling…or Feeling & Thinking, Part 1

We humans certainly have a strange and special relationship with our cognition, don’t we?  Orders of magnitude more complex than that of any other creature by a considerable margin, I describe the field of human psychology this way:

“Humans have a unique relationship between mind and body that includes awareness, self-awareness, and awareness of self-awareness.”

Our cognition is complex, and one of the results of that complexity is the curiosity and drive to understand the process of cognition itself.  Humans are the meta species, in so many ways.

Part of that analysis has included a broad dichotomy between thinking and feeling.  Certain mental processes seem to involve rationality, and others the valuation of pure experience.  If you know Myers-Briggs or related Jungian personality approaches this probably sounds familiar.  We all rely on both of these constantly.

Here’s what I’ve come to see though.  We tend to collectively overvalue thinking.

Say WHAAAAAAT?!

If you’ve ever talked to me for any extended period of time you know I LOOOOOOOOOOVE to think.  You might say I have strong feelings about thinking, which seems cheeky, circular and paradoxical.  But, I digress 😄

A long time ago I had a college professor with whom I really didn’t mesh well.  Even recalling this story 20 years later makes my skin crawl a bit.  Do you have people like that in your life too?  I was much less mature back then, and so I saw that as the license to treat her poorly and avoid personal responsibility, which caught up with me eventually.  But she cared about me, and I didn’t see or acknowledge that at the time.  At one point she said, “Aaron, you’re a thinker.”  She saw me.  And that was before I really even understood what thinking was, or the significance it has played in the history of humanity given philosophy, science, mathematics, logic, and the like.

So, thinking is second nature for me, to a fault.  It’s one of the reasons people find me helpful, and I love that.  And we collectively revere intelligence.

But I’ve been thinking about thinking.

And I’ve realized you can do a lot of thinking for nothing if you do it at the wrong time.

And the wrong time is BEFORE feeling.  Feel first, think second.  Always.  Or you solve problems that don’t exist.

How do I know this?  See you in Part 2!