irrational rationality

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine, who is a young talented poet, actor and a writer.  We were talking about a post on FB  and I asked for her views.  Her response was that she felt strongly but she wanted to think before she wrote.  I asked her to write about her feelings and not her thoughts and she said she would try, but never did write.  Another friend of mine, in her early 30s talked to me about how often she struggles with knowing what her feelings are, i.e. is she feeling angry or is she feeling sad and how important is it for her to "know" her feelings before she  responds.

These discussions provoked me to write this post about how I come across people, both men and women, who are very cautious about coming across to others as sentimental or mushy.  It is as though, expressions of passion, of anger, of love, of irritation, of reactivity, of loss, of joy, of desire, of longing, of disgust, of lust, etc, must always be moderated, thought through, considered, and then expressed cautiously like squeezed out portions of toothpaste from a tube!

What is interesting about this game is that it is never ending, the more you play, the more lost you are, because feelings don't come with meanings, they gush out without any barrier, flood your inner world.  Feelings make you feel alive, make you feel at one with yourself, they are the key to your inner world.  It is the world of feelings that also holds the key to our creativity, our passion, our zest for life and our will to live.  The more we try to understand our feelings before we act, the more are we operating from our need to control our world of future action and positioning ourselves firmly only in the world of consequences,   In the world of consequence, there is no present, only past and future and both are beyond our control.   The present is the only reality we live in and that can be experienced through our feelings.

Hence I wonder why do we keep playing a losing game with ourselves?