Good Life Project - Reason and Passion

Episode Date: February 9, 2017

There’s this beautiful verse in Khalil Gibran’s book, The Prophet that speaks to the interplay between reason and passion. It reminds us that these two qualities, so often treated as opposing forces and even warring world-views, are actually essential and hopelessly co-mingled elements of a live well-lived. They each make the other possible. Gibran writes: For […]The post Reason and Passion appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode is brought to you by Camp GLP. It's an amazing opportunity to come hang out with me, with our awesome Good Life Project team, a lineup of inspiring teachers from art to life to work, and a community of almost impossibly friendly grown-up campers from literally all over the world as we take over a beautiful summer camp for three and a half days of workshops and activities that fill your noggin with ideas and strategies for life and create the type of friendships and stories you thought you'd pretty much left behind decades ago. It's all happening at the end of August, just about 90 minutes from

New York City, and more than half the spots are already gone. So be sure to grab your spot quickly. You can learn more at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes. On to our show. Hey there, it's Jonathan with this week's Good Life Project riff. So I've been spending some time recently rereading a book called The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. If you've never read it, I really strongly recommend that you steal away some time, grab a copy of it. It's super short. I'm a really slow reader and literally it takes me about an hour to go end to end. I've read it a number of times, and I was feeling the call to dip back into it.

It's really beautiful. It's sort of one very long poem. And it tells the story of a man who has arrived in a town and spent his time there kind of working and being. And after some dozen years, his ship finally is being seen coming into the harbor to pick him up, and he's about to leave the town. And the town has come to see him as a prophet, thus the name of the book, and a teacher and somebody who's wise. And as he moves through the town towards the ship, a crowd, the townspeople, gather around him, and they all ask questions. They want final bits of knowledge before he leaves.

And so they go topic by topic, and they say, and tell us about this, and tell us about that. And as I was reading, I got to the point where Kali Gabran writes, and the priestess spoke again and said, speak to us of reason and passion. And I thought that was a really interesting topic to explore because reason and passion are things that we seem to be deeply immersed in these days

on so many different levels. So I was reading it and I said, wow, this is beautiful and powerful and it resonates in so many ways. So I want to read just a few of the lines from that particular passage and then share a couple of extra thoughts. So Gibran continues here. And he answered, nay, the lovers of all of your elements? Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken. You can but toss and drift or else be held at a standstill in mid seas. For reason ruling alone is a force confining and passion unattended is a flame that burns to

its own destruction. Therefore, let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing. And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix, rise above its own ashes. So that passage so resonates with me. We tend to sort of split down these two lines these days. And it's not just these days, it's just in general in life. Think about reason and we think about passion. And we think to ourselves, well, you know, which one do we want to operate from? And we say to ourselves, well, I want to be a passionate person. I want to throw caution to the wind. I want to throw reason out the window. It's time for me to embrace and lead with passion. I've got to let my heart shine. I've got to find in mind that deep intuitive side

of myself and let myself be washed over with fierce intuition and passion and make all of my decisions in life from that place, that's where life becomes lit up. And then there's the other part of us or the other side of us or the other personality that says, no, no, no, no, that's reckless. You know, what we need to do is think things through. You know, the appropriate approach to life is the rational approach to life. Because if you don't think things through, then you will find yourself taking risks that will leave you open to judgment, to becoming outcast, to becoming penniless,

to becoming powerless, to becoming dead. You will risk all sorts of things that are unjustifiable. And that is not the good life. That is not a good life. That is a life that is misspent. So we have these two things, and we look at reason and passion as things that war against each other, but also ways to lead your decision-making process and to no small extent our lives that are mutually exclusive from one another. You're either a reasonable person or you're a passionate person. You either lead with decisive intelligence, rational cognitive analysis, you make judgments about what's right and wrong and make logical choices, or you're flighty and you lead with your heart and you follow wherever your passions take you and you just go wherever you want to go. And we don't see these things as mutually dependent or even necessary for one another. And what I love about Gibran's passage in the Prophet here is that what he's saying is that, in fact, these things cannot really exist without the other, that the approach to life that yields beauty,

that yields grace, is the approach to life that says that one, in fact, not only coexists with the other, that reason not only coexists with passion and passion with reason, but that reason is, in fact, the thing that enables passion to be a part of you. And passion is a powerful balancing and enabling element for reason. That these things are two decision-making processes. They're two ways to live that not only are codependent, but necessary for the full realization of either. If you look at the work of noted behavioral economist, legendary researcher Daniel Kahneman, you see the same thing. He actually

identifies what he calls two different thinking systems, the fast thinking system and the slow thinking system. And the fast one is the intuitive one. It's the one where, you know, the answers just come to you. The decision about what to do next, it just kind of comes and it happens very quickly. And you can't often analytically deconstruct where it comes from, but you feel it in your bones and you just know that it's right. And then the slower thinking system that Kahneman describes is the one that's more rational. It's reasoned. It's the analytical, logical side. It's the one that says, let me weigh all of the different variables here

and make a logical decision about what to do here. And what Kahneman discovered in his research is that our assumptions tend to be about which is right and which is wrong, tend to be wrong. And in fact, there is no right and wrong. There are different modes that get blended and used for problems of different complexity that tend to say, we need both systems. For us to make really well-informed decisions. We can't just be logical. We also must understand the passions and the emotions underneath it, the intuitive side of things.

And for us to make those powerful, passionate, intuitive hits, those decisions that just seem to drop from somewhere deep inside of us and emerge as a feeling, we also need to be steeped in the rational, the logical. They empower and enable each other. And they're useful as not competing factors, but as contributing factors in a decision-making process. So I thought it was really fascinating how Kahlil Gibran's saying, reason and passion must in fact coexist. They must enable each other for us to be in the world and make powerful decisions. That we don't just decide on what's reasoned and logical, and we don't just decide on what's passionate.

But we actually lead with both because they enable one another, that that's actually in fact backed up by a pretty powerful body of research from Kahneman. And as Khalil Gibran says in this passage, for reason ruling alone is a force confining and passion unattended is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Therefore, let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion that it may sing and let it direct your passion with reason that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection like the phoenix writhe above its own ashes.

So as you think about moving forward, as you think about this idea of reason and passion and I should be more reasonable or I should be more passionate, So as you think about moving forward, as you think about this idea of reason and passion, and I should be more reasonable, or I should be more passionate, how can I tap these? You know, I should be this kind of person. Maybe reframe it and think to yourself, these coexist, they must coexist, because they create and enable each other. And how can I move through life in a way that both allows me to come from a place of reason and simultaneously of profound passion?

Something to think about as I'm sort of spinning through this book. And I just want to share it with you today. Reason and passion. Two things, two essential parts of us. Spend a little time thinking about how they dance together in your own life and how you would like them to dance together in the life that you create from this moment forward. I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra

seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference in somebody else's lives, take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for. Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then, of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively, because that's

how we rise. When stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much as always for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.