Well, here I am at Blog Writing Time with no groovy links to share, so I guess I will have to actually talk about my life or something.

I’ve been in a strange emotional state lately. Very mixed. A lot of the time I am split between feeling anxious and feeling fine. Part of me is relaxed and going through my life and part of me is on the razor’s edge of going completely mental.

I guess I am kind of in denial. I keep just pushing those anxious feelings down below the conscious level and not dealing with them, and that is the opposite of healthy.

And as a result, they are building up on me and I feel like I am going to pop.

I think this is all a result of my spirit trying to shed another skin so it can grow another size and become stronger. And that is a good thing. I need all the strength I can get. I have been brittle, dark and cold inside for far too long. I need strength and light and heat.

But the process is difficult. The old skin struggles mightily to contain the new, greater self, and thus maintain the status quo, even though the status quo sucks. There is always a part of us that resists change, even if that change is assuredly positive.

Thus, there is always a certain amount of struggle in growth. Like Nietzsche said, we must always overcome ourselves. The new Normal, the better one, comes only at the price of a long and painful journey, and we must let out goal inspire us and pull us forward if we are to make the trip.

And that means that, on some level, you have to have faith. Faith that you know what you are doing, even if your conscious mind does not. Faith that your heart knows what will make it happy, and that pursuing its aims will take you to your own Promised Land.

Faith that while the path might be difficult indeed, you can overcome all obstacles and become stronger and more resilient for having done so.

All of this is instinctual to human beings. We strive to grow without ever knowing that is what we are doing, any more than a salmon knows why it is fighting its way upstream or what it will do when it gets there. And normal, healthy people benefit from following these instincts.

But us intellectual types typically demand far too much of reality for that. We only want to do things which make sense to our rational minds. “It just felt right” is not nearly sufficient reason for us. Murky and indistinct things like instincts are something we ignore and suppress in favor of the cold clear light of reason provided by our powerful minds.

Thus, we suffer in ways that people of normal intelligence do not. We drive ourselves mad by demanding such exacting logic of the world and ignoring all the rest. We tie ourselves into knots trying to “figure out” why we do things when the answer is often just “because we felt like it”.

And while the cold clean light of reason is a very powerful tool that is the very wellspring of human progress, and its products have created the world we live in today, logic and reason have light, but not heat. They can’t make you less sad, less lonely, less isolated, or even less crazy.

Only emotion can do that, and to let emotion in is to accept the unreasoned and unresonable into your mind. In order to do it, you must learn to accept that emotions are not rational and that in life, you have to do some of the things that others do, things your rational mind thinks are “pointless” because it cannot accept that some things are worth doing purely for the experience of doing them.

There are times when following your heart is the only way to find the way out of your own labyrinth. The heart might not be smart but it can be very wise. It can know the solution when that rational mind that seems so powerful is merely chasing its own tail in circles and thinking it is making progress.

To try to live as either reason or emotion is to try to be half a person, and half-people can never be happy. Without emotion life is not worth living. Emotions are the sole reason any of us does anything. We all seek pleasure and avoid pain. The manifestations of that are quite complex in us human beings, but the guiding principle remains the same.

We just want to feel good.

On the other hand, emotion without reason leads to an unhappy and unwise life. We have excellent brains for a reason and if we go around simply doing whatever feels right at that moment, we are bound to end up with a very unpleasant life indeed.

My concern is with my own intellect’s dominance over emotion. As a lonely intellectual with access to the Internet, I have had extraordinarily rich opportunities to develop my mind. Practically everything I do of a day that isn’t eating, grooming, or eliminating is designed to stimulate this big bad brain of mine.

But what about my soul? What about my spirit? What happens to them when they are trapped behind these mirror-smooth walls of ice? Do they suffer? Do they cry? Do they yearn to be free?

Yes, they do, and the result is my own misery. I know damned well that I can’t think my way out of my problems, and yet that is all I know how to do.

I feel like I am still standing in the doorway of a new personal world, like a cat, not sure yet if I want to go through the door but trying desperately to summon up the nerve to do so.

And part of me just wants to smash everything that is holding me back and run off into the night, never to return to my old life again.

Hopefully, it won’t ever come to that.