Perform the Action, the Feeling Will Follow
While driving home from St. Louis a couple of days ago, I tuned into a talk show. I’ve turned into an old person. Do you remember being a child and driving with some adult who refused to listen to anything but AM talk radio? Much to my family’s chagrin, that’s pretty much me. But I digress…
A guest called the program to tell the host how much he loved his now pregnant wife and how happy their marriage of three years has been. His problem? It seems he is afraid to make love to his wife now that she is pregnant. He had trouble articulating his reasoning, but short answer is, it stemmed from the fact that she has a baby inside her and he doesn’t want to hurt the infant and that fear has quelled his desire.
It took the host several minutes to get to the root of the problem and it seems that this young mans fear is not that uncommon a problem. She reassured him that unless his wife’s physician has indicated a medical reason not to have sex that doing so would not jeopardize the welfare of the unborn baby.
Among other advice, she made the following decree…perform the action and the feeling will follow. I’ve been brooding over that one statement since I heard it.
I have a kind of fixation with the moral decline of America and the world in general, if you haven’t noticed already. For the purposes of this post, we’ll take the subject of marriage again. I have stated many times in the past that marriage has become more a matter of convenience then of commitment. By and large, it has become for as long as our love shall last and not for as long as we both shall live.
It is my estimation that too much in this world happens based on a particular feeling at a particular moment in time. A person’s feelings tend to vacillate over time. This notion of performing the action and the feeling will follow seems, to me, to apply very much in the subject of marriage on many levels.
The Advaitin philosopher Chandrashekhara Bharati Swaminah put it this way, “by exercising your free-will in the past, you brought on the resultant fate.” Or the Pubbekatahetuvada teaches, the belief that all happiness and suffering arise from previous action. Ever not been in the mood until you became engaged in the act???
Don’t misunderstand me, I am not advocating an if it feels good, do it society. That would be the reverse of the point of this. If one performs a particular action then a particular feeling will eventually occur. The same could also be true of immoral acts and negative effects, I would postulate.
My hope for my epiphany concerning this statement is to encourage you the next time you become apathetic. Make yourself perform the action, even if you don’t want to, and the feeling will eventually come. This is an area of my marriage that I need to concentrate on at times.
A guest called the program to tell the host how much he loved his now pregnant wife and how happy their marriage of three years has been. His problem? It seems he is afraid to make love to his wife now that she is pregnant. He had trouble articulating his reasoning, but short answer is, it stemmed from the fact that she has a baby inside her and he doesn’t want to hurt the infant and that fear has quelled his desire.
It took the host several minutes to get to the root of the problem and it seems that this young mans fear is not that uncommon a problem. She reassured him that unless his wife’s physician has indicated a medical reason not to have sex that doing so would not jeopardize the welfare of the unborn baby.
Among other advice, she made the following decree…perform the action and the feeling will follow. I’ve been brooding over that one statement since I heard it.
I have a kind of fixation with the moral decline of America and the world in general, if you haven’t noticed already. For the purposes of this post, we’ll take the subject of marriage again. I have stated many times in the past that marriage has become more a matter of convenience then of commitment. By and large, it has become for as long as our love shall last and not for as long as we both shall live.
It is my estimation that too much in this world happens based on a particular feeling at a particular moment in time. A person’s feelings tend to vacillate over time. This notion of performing the action and the feeling will follow seems, to me, to apply very much in the subject of marriage on many levels.
The Advaitin philosopher Chandrashekhara Bharati Swaminah put it this way, “by exercising your free-will in the past, you brought on the resultant fate.” Or the Pubbekatahetuvada teaches, the belief that all happiness and suffering arise from previous action. Ever not been in the mood until you became engaged in the act???
Don’t misunderstand me, I am not advocating an if it feels good, do it society. That would be the reverse of the point of this. If one performs a particular action then a particular feeling will eventually occur. The same could also be true of immoral acts and negative effects, I would postulate.
My hope for my epiphany concerning this statement is to encourage you the next time you become apathetic. Make yourself perform the action, even if you don’t want to, and the feeling will eventually come. This is an area of my marriage that I need to concentrate on at times.
Labels: Moral/Social
posted by Troy at 8:30 AM
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