Walking around Cork city one evening, I noticed that I was feeling extremely gloomy. Moreover, the city seemed to feel the same way. The streets felt bleak and the people seemed subdued.
I kept walking and ended up in an Indian restaurant. I emerged an hour later, full, and began wandering again. Something had changed. My feeling of gloom had gone. But so had the feeling of gloom in Cork. The streets were brighter and the people had cheered up no end. In fact they looked more cheerful than I could remember for quite some time. We must really have turned a corner in this country, I thought. Then I realised that, of course, it was the lamb vindaloo and a full stomach that had brightened everything up.
Why do we take ourselves so seriously? Go around on an empty stomach and you feel gloomy. Have a good dinner and the whole world changes. How is it possible that such complex creatures as ourselves, the Masters of the Universe no less, can have our entire view of life and of the world manipulated so simply?
I don’t know how it’s possible but it all backs up the belief – found, for instance, in the Japanese Morita therapy – that we should aim to be led by our purposes more than by our feelings. Our feelings, as they would say, are like the Japanese sky: sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear. Purposes, on the other hand, can be a more constant guide to what we should be doing.
Japanese psychiatrist
That’s why I like the work of Shomo Morita, a Japanese psychiatrist working about 100 years ago, who summed up his approach as “Know your purpose, know your feelings, do what needs to be done.”
And it isn’t all about being terribly serious. Your purpose could be to go to the carnival; your feeling could be that it’s silly to go to the carnival at your age and with so many more serious things you could be doing; and what needs to be done is to get yourself to the carnival.
The confusing thing about feelings is that we tend to look immediately for explanations for them and we so often get it wrong.
Maybe something you had to eat yesterday created an unnoticed chemical event in your body during the night and the side effect was that you woke up this morning feeling irritable.
When you woke up you noticed you were irritable and you at once attributed this to having to meet that overbearing so-and-so in the office at 10 this morning to listen to more of his absurd complaints. So you go from the unknown physical event to a feeling to an explanation that may have nothing to do with what’s really going on.
That’s not to deny that life without feelings would be like an orchestra without music.
One of the hardest aspects of depression is that people don’t have the range of feelings that they used to have until after the depression lifts.
So perhaps we need to treat feelings like visitors that are sometimes welcome and sometimes not but who walk in and make themselves at home anyway. We don’t always need to launch a public inquiry into why a particular feeling is there. It has wandered in off the street and sometimes you can just leave it at that.
It may be that if you give your visitor a slice of cake and a mug of tea, it will go away and be replaced by a more satisfied customer. But beware: if you make getting rid of the feeling in this way your priority, it may come back for more and more and more.
It’s better to have a certain level of equanimity when it comes to feelings. Many feelings can be left to their own devices while you get on with the ordinary purposes of life. You might never know why such and such a feeling came, or what made it pass, and it might not even matter.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email. pomorain@yahoo.com