On some consequences of the therapeutic injunction: "Don't think, say what you feel!"

Susan Sontag notes in one of her journals: feeling is thought and thought is feeling. Shakespeare understood this: in their soliloquies and statements to others, his characters are always representing passionate states as verbal thoughts, and their verbal thoughts as having meanings that are bound up with what they care about. Affective states represent and describe what we care about in terms of what it means to us. Less dependent on statements, modern theater merely shifts thought into the more purely dramatic expressions of persona and personality. If you can grasp a feeling by describing what it is or is about, you are in the realm of thought even if you have not left your feeling behind.

Business psychologies always try to break this link. Step outside your feeling and describe it as if it is not you, or does not affect you. Art remains as the practice that depends on feeling. Feelings can be worked on and transformed. They cannot always be controlled. Sometimes one should take a distance from them, sometimes not. They are not entitled automatically to some authorizing authority over ourselves and others, but they also cannot easily be ignored or denied. Feeling a feeling and being "in" it is not itself good or bad.

Life is rarely as simple as it appears from the point of view of management. Sometimes that is good; often it isn't. Our powers of understanding would be cripplingly limited if we always managed our feelings to keep them from drowning us in suffering. We can understand the world and ourselves well enough to manage things, but our understanding must go way beyond if we want not just to be able to deal with what is happening but to understand it. The powers and needs of the contemplative life will therefore always exceed those of the active life. Business is getting things done. Some people think on evolutionary or behaviorist or pragmatist grounds that that is what living a life is ultimately about. This is a tautological claim if the question is purpose or success. So much more complex than any tool or machine, our minds are not in essence tools or machines. This is why we need leisure, reflection, and slowness; we need to take time and not just use it.