How to Combat Over-Emotionalism

You have to be willing to experience, including experience with your emotions. Experience as a whole person. If something hurts, or stings, or aches, you can cry. You can acknowledge it to yourself. Know that this feeling isn't the end, however.

In the end, you are okay. Perhaps, also, in the middle you are okay. A feeling is important, an emotion can be recognized, but in the very fact that you embraced it for what it was, you can find how to place it in its proper order. Emotions are below reason, just as lay people are below religious. It's completely fine, and indeed essential, to have both. It's fine not to feel happy but you have to know that you are. You have to be okay.

Okay sounds like an insipid concept, not as rich or full as happy. But who can go around pummeling into his own mind the fact that he is happy? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we don't experience our happiness that way. We just live it. And when we stop to feel, we often feel bad. When we feel good, it's a boon and a grace (and a source of gratitude); nevertheless, it's normal to see your emotions as a big bundle of negativity that occasionally washes over your otherwise placid soul. Maybe it is the case, maybe not. What is certainly true is that these bad feelings you occasionally have are not it. The "it" is what you will discover in what you do and not in stopping to feel. Feel, sure, but be okay.

PS

I think it's elegant to put the main point of a communication in the PS.

Virtue

Virtue lies in putting on your mascara, even when you don't feel like it.

Yes

To love you have to bring your "yes" to the other, without bringing also the difficulty of that "yes."

Overuse of Parentheses

I just wrote an email and, looking back over it, I can see I sadly overused parenthetical expressions. I had no less than seven sets of parentheses! Even the salutation included persons in parentheses; then, each of the four short paragraphs had at least one set included; luckily, however, I didn't find a way to put parentheses into my closing. If I had, it would only have completed my ruin. I need to invest in dashes!

Men

How frail and helpless men are at times! I do not mean this to be condescending. Without the inner solace of a woman, men have trouble absorbing the pummels of daily living, especially unassisted by grace. Moreover, men cannot easily separate themselves from their work; their identity is bound up in the tossing and turning ship of external affairs.