The heart is associated with feelings and emotion and the mind with thought and reason. How did that come about, though? Did some people, appointed by a collective on account of proven intellect and mandated thereby to discuss such matters, come up with this conclusion, this separation of mind and heart with emotion pushed into one and thought into the other?
Come to think of it, did knowledge and fact or what is taken
to be either result from similar processes?
Did it all evolve over time, with language and notions of propriety,
based on some vague majoritarian acceptance, affirmation and then if necessary
written into cultural texts and even the law?
We don’t know how it all happened, but let’s not allow the
ignorance to stop us from questioning norms or what is called ‘accepted
thinking’. ‘I follow my heart,’ some
people say. Others say ‘I defer to
reason’. It’s as though some people are
made of heart and some of mind. It’s as
if those who are heart-made and mindless and those made of mind are
heartless. It’s probably safe to say
that everyone has a heart and also a mind where specific actions follow input
from both, some appearing to be clinically rational or inclined that way while
others ‘coming straight from the heart’ and impulsive in appearance.
It might be of academic interest to discover the true
location of feelings and reason, but in the end that bit of ‘knowledge’ doesn’t
help us come up with courses of action or words better suited for the matter at
hand.
In the past few days commuters have been a bit inconvenienced
by special traffic arrangements in view of CHOGM 2013, but no one can say he or
she was not forewarned. By and large,
people knew the times certain parts of certain roads would be closed and took
alternative routes to chosen destinations. The inconvenience was worse the week
before with road crews working day and night to get everything done before
whatever deadline they had been given.
It was even worse on rainy days.
On one such night, the traffic in Kotahena had slowed to a
crawl. It seemed that everyone had
avoided the Baseline Road. It was a
matter of moving a few inches and waiting for anything between half a minute
and five minutes to get moving again. During one of the longer ‘stay-put’ occasions
when one has to find ways to while away the time and to keep impatience in
check, my eyes strayed to the other side of the road. There was a man with a branch of a tree. It was quick a big branch and looked pretty
heavy too. The man was struggling, but
he managed to part life and part drag it to the road. He planted it in a gaping hole that the heavy
rains had carved out of the road.
It was raining heavily.
The man was drenched. He was not
wearing any uniform that could indicate that repairing roads or planting
warning signs was part of his job. He
must have been an ordinary citizen who stepped in because he knew the
consequences of an unwary motorist driving into the rut. Indeed I would not have imagined there was
need for a warning sign. It was just too
dark and it had rained too much.
The point is, it was ‘none of his business’; and yet this
nondescript stranger obviously was concerned about his fellow creatures. He was walking; he was not driving or being
driven. He was drenched, unlike those who passed him by and unlike anyone who
might have got into a spot of bother had he not ‘installed’ the ‘warning’, he
was on his feet.
Some might think him crazy.
‘Is he out of his mind?’ is a question that might be asked. ‘Crazy,’ because few if any would imagine
himself or herself in that man’s shoes; sorry, ‘position’, for he wore neither
shoes or slippers. For the majority,
what that man did was not logical. It
defied the notion of self-interest. So where
did it all come from? That man’s mind or
his heart? If those who could not do
something like that desist out of reason, then is his act heart-driven? But then again isn’t ‘decision’ eminently
thought-made?
But had he continued on his journey, someone might have
driven a vehicle into the hole and who knows what might have happened? The man would not have known and would not
have been in a position to laugh or lament.
The point is, he envisaged. He
empathized with the possible victim. He
thought with his heart. He felt with his
mind. If we fiddle around the language,
we can of course come up with a cogent refutation and conclude, ‘no, heart
feels and mind thinks’.
Does it matter?
One thing is certain.
He did the ‘unthinkable’ or rather an unthinkable; something that the
collective has not evolved to ‘do’ but which an individual who feels and thinks
differently will not hesitate to do.
It is good to flip things around now and then. The world looks different then. Someone does cost-benefit calculation,
determines that cost outweighs benefit and does it nevertheless. The world can do with a little bit more
tenderness.
He kept me company all the way thereafter, through each five
minute stop and the one-inch-at-time drive.
msenevira@gmail.com
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