Forward Feeling
by Marion Ragaliauskas
We are all familiar, I guess, with the concept and language of forward thinking. I’ve long been curious about the role of feeling and emotion in decision making and planning ahead. It has a lot to do with my own orientation to time and e-motion. I connect more fluently to my past than thoughts of my future, and I’m pretty in touch with my feelings - although a lot of those who know me would say it’s hard to tell!
My inner experience of feeling - and its more muscular cousin – emotion - may have few observable signs, but does at times get in the way of me being as present as I would like to be - particularly when I need to be a fully functioning grown up. Feel too much, think too little - never great for me, especially when I need a level of critical judgement and clear thinking. A stable mind. At other times rationality takes over without so much as a nod or a wink to sensibilities. Why does it matter?
Thinking and feeling of course are not disconnected – what we think stimulates what we feel and reminds us that the importance of emotional intelligence, or ‘affective competence’ is not to be underestimated. Behaviour follows feeling.
How we engage with forward planning and change in particular is a big issue just now. So many things are being circulated about the desire to make the world a better place post-coronavirus. A desire to hold on to the best bits of what we are experiencing, what we are feeling. The good bits.
Any attempt at proactively changing anything needs to bring together Thinking, Feeling and Will (to act). Any preparation for change needs to engage more than thoughts and ideas. It has to invite in the feeling realm – and let it settle in. Not kick it out when it gets too awkward or demanding or when the initial interest has waned.
At a time when feelings and emotions are aroused (like they are now!) and the impact of decisions is being felt (like they are now!) it’s easier to imagine the never-letting-it-go-back-to-how-it-was! desire will still hold the same level of meaning and vitality as it does now. We are in it. But ‘it’ won’t last forever.
Whatever and however our individual and collective ‘future visioning’ is created, it needs to find ways of bringing the felt experience in and making it a permanent resident. I’m hopeful about the future more than I have been for a long time because - to nick a line from a Disney song - for the first time in forever - the majority of the population are feeling the impact of the pandemic. Even as some are sitting in their back gardens in flip-flops drinking wine, they are also becoming aware of the deprivations, the miseries as well as the decency and bravery of previously ignored or unseen humanity, and they have feelings about it.
In preparing for a different – and better – world, warm feelings of community, empathy and togetherness need to be maintained. When the real life implications of a different and better world kick in - what it will feel like to let go of things we really don’t need but would like to have anyway, how it will feel when the sharing out of resources means a little less of what we had, and so on – will, in one way or another – need to have been agreed as a new social contract. People will really need to buy into this.
In our creative spaces and re-imagining the world forums there needs to be a way to engage into and with ‘the community’. Getting the buy in of regular folk with regular lives who don’t spend their time on developmental quests, have no truck with the awakening of consciousness, but who are in this moment maybe just a little more open to the possibility of real change and what it might feel like. What the real consequences will be.
Long before physical distancing is over, thinking and feeling the need to grasp hold of one another tightly and when the time comes, their (often pompous and over ambitious) relative, Willing, invited in for a group hug. I know that when these three unite – wish-desire-intent – we all have a better chance of changing things.