A Necessary Emptiness: The Heart of Reason
Recently, I was wondering why people grieve. Why they seem to go into these cycles of self-conflict, confusion and despair. They often don’t tell people about it (especially men) until it may be too late.
I find grief in my own self too. There is a sense of despair, of longing, of something so very missing. While my mind scrambles to find many reasons for why this may be so, I guess it has something to do with a feeling of emptiness that we all carry around. We have a poor relationship with this feeling and are bound to it like gravity binds the moon to the earth.
I, too, try to run away from my grief, my loneliness and I’ve been doing it so long that I’ve become aware how spectacularly unsuccessful one can be at this. The endeavour to rid ourselves of these maladies like they were diseases is bound to end in failure. The harsh truth is that these are not diseases, they are fundamental gifts given to us. For even in our tastebuds, there is a sensation of sweetness, salt and bitterness too. We are beings with a spectrum and that means we have to feel our way into our despair, our grief and see what else lies there.
Could it be possible that no emotional state is contained by only one emotion? As a man, this feels like a revelation but I somehow feel this may be painfully obvious as a woman. The emotional state we inhabit often has a major emotion that we may be able to identify. But this large and obvious fish, as it were, swims in the ocean of our feeling with many other small and medium sized fishes. This ocean, like any body of water teeming with health, is also filled with predators. We know this because we have felt our darker emotions as well.
So, in the sea of my being, there are many fishes—large and small, good and bad. They all exist in an ecosystem and when things happen to us, it is like a hole in the ice appears and we tremble at the sight of what lives underneath. Isn’t this true for us all? In times when we have been “emotionally disconnected”, the sight of emotionality overwhelms us. The ice represents our cold, frigid and entirely rational attitudes to the landscape of our lives, where we do not wish to engage with feeling because it cannot be controlled. Or we feel so disconnected from our emotional selves that it feels like our feelings lie encased in inches of frozen ice. Would it be right to say that if one is regularly aware and visiting the sea of their emotions, they never get overwhelmed, they never get bogged down by their grief because they always know it is there?
It’s quite a statement and as a male who has tried to be in touch with emotions regularly, it is harder to do than it is to write about it. The wild sea of emotions is too wild for man—and I can agree with that—but the arctic landscape of rationality is too cold for me, as it is for many. There are opinions on both sides of the spectrum where one side disregards the validity of emotions, labels them chaotic and debilitating and the other finds rationality and reason too demanding, too confusing and far too dead —though perhaps this perceived deadness is itself an emotional response, a kind of grief for the messiness and warmth that pure logic excludes.
The funny thing is that our emotions and reason aren’t separate faculties of our beings. Over time I have come to the sobering conclusions that reality ‘is what it is’ and our reason, our feelings are modes through which we interpret this ‘reality’. One could say, to put it in a simple analogy, that the mind sees through the way of reason and the heart sees through the way of feeling.
This, I must say, is too simplistic and dangerous. Just like we have created a rift between reason and emotion, we might do the same with the heart and the head. That would be very silly and I’ve learnt that human beings aren’t above being silly if they feel like it. I’ve seen ‘rational people’ be impulsive and irrational and I’ve seen ‘emotional people’ be very calculated and practical. It is often the lack of awareness of the other side of the coin that drives their unconscious behaviour.
Mary Wollstonecraft, writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, argued that true virtue requires both faculties working in concert—that reason without feeling produces cold calculation, while feeling without reason leads to mere impulse. Susan Sontag would later echo this in her essays on the intellect of feeling, suggesting that our most profound insights often arrive through what she called “passionate thinking”—that electric moment when the mind and heart recognise the same truth simultaneously. Iris Murdoch took this further with her concept of “attention”—that quality of consciousness that is neither purely rational nor purely emotional, but a kind of loving gaze that sees clearly because it cares deeply. This attention, she argued, is how we truly perceive reality, not through the cold lens of logic nor the hot blur of emotion, but through a patient, tender awareness that requires both.
In my early twenties I was reading the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There was a guy I worked with who said:
“Every person I’ve seen reading that book, eventually became an asshole after they finished it.”
I really wondered what he meant, because I was reading it out of curiosity. Looking back on it, I do think there is a very rational framework that the book espouses and it speaks of discipline, mastery and control. I also think that somehow it used emotion to connect to the reader and drive its rational point home more effectively. I don’t remember much (or anything actually) from the book but it did not teach me anything about emotional awareness or my own sense of self. I think it used the emptiness inside me very well and gave me all these frameworks of success with the promise that if I followed them, I would be happy and successful. Eventually, this translated into a promise that upon success, I wouldn’t have to feel that emptiness. It was obvious. Why did I pick up the book and that guy didn’t? Because it appealed to me as a cure for my emptiness.
Now, along with the rift between reason and emotion we have the insidious approach of using emotion to promote reason, like the 7 Habits did. Not too different from emotional manipulation. Many self-help books and now YouTube videos do the same.
‘Does your life suck? Here’s how to fix it…’,
‘I stopped doing this one thing and it changed my life…’,
‘Fix your [ insert problem here ] by doing this one thing…’
They not only use clickbait titles to get your curiosity to work, but they also expertly gloss over the issue and present a solution without properly understanding it. One would think that the trending era of self-help books would have helped but it seems they just gave us new problems to enjoy.
What this does come back to is the fact that we feel lonely, we feel grief, we feel loss, we feel confused and the truth that things don’t always make sense in our heads or our hearts. I don’t see many people telling us that’s okay—that it is completely normal and a fundamental part of the human experience to feel these emotions that might not make sense. Maybe this is because we’re all far too individual now and have lost connection to community. Maybe it’s because we’re too busy, too ambitious, too caught up in everything that there’s no space in our lives. But does the reason matter? Would it be not better to simply sit with the fact that we feel what we feel?
What if this emptiness is providing the necessary space in our inner lives that we don’t have in our outer ones? What if we are in conflict with ourselves because this part of ourselves, called reason, is fighting against everything else? What if we are drowning in grief because there has been a tsunami in our sea of emotion? Maybe some of us are in chaos because we despise reason and allow the whims and fancies of our feelings to guide our lives.
Photo by Judith Butler offers a perspective on this tsunami—that grief, in its very nature, reveals something essential about our condition. “ Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other,” she writes, and in being undone, we discover that we were never the autonomous, self-contained beings we imagined ourselves to be. Grief shows us that others live inside us, that we are porous, that the boundaries we draw between self and world are more wishful thinking than reality. Perhaps this is why grief feels so overwhelming—it’s not just the loss of another, but the revelation of how much of ourselves was made of their substance.
What if, essentially, most of our problems stem from this inability to give both these sides of the coin their adequate due? We may be governing a state where either reason or emotion is at the helm. We might want to expand this council and give them both equal footing. This requires, inevitably, that we discover the wonders and limitations of our lesser used mode. If we are more often given to feeling then we need to understand reason better. If we are cold, calculated and hyper-rational, then we may want to explore our feelings better.
The balance is key. I’ve seen hyper-rational people go into their feelings and then never come back. They have gone into the ‘other side’ and find that their past rationality was an illusion. This is coming from a direct conversation I had with an ex-lawyer. It’s a common thing where people get fed up of the mainstream culture and end up joining the counter culture. But there’s a key thing here: feeling and reason are two sides of the same coin. If one says ‘feeling is all wrong’ then that means reason is all wrong too. If one says ‘rationality sucks! We don’t need it.’ Then feeling sucks too and would be equally unnecessary.
It all comes back to the understanding that we cannot have one without the other. So if you are feeling grief, feel it. Is it new? Then all the more reason one should feel it. Chances are that this grief is old and has been ignored for a long time. I wouldn’t know what to say to someone who has feels more than they think because I’ve never experienced that. But I guess all I could say is ‘give it a chance. It’s not all bad.’ Maybe this a wise design of nature to have different people proficient in different levels of feeling and thinking. Then it is up to us to give the other side adequate respect and validity for their perspectives. Maybe that’s how the world goes round.
Thank you for reading. Here is a poem that may enrich your heart-mind:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.— Naomi Shihab Nye