What does influence our way of thinking? What does determine our believes, our point of view of the world? These are questions that have been around for some time and probably will never cease to be. Each of us has an own point of view and interpretation of reality. When Obama was elected many people were happy. However that election meant something different to all those people because each of them as a particular point of view, a particular way to understand and comprehend that event or define the word change which was used so much during the campaign. If tragedy struck, like the recent floods in Northern Luzon in the Philippines, each individual who lived through that or through TV images sees that tragedy in a particular way. It is like as people see reality in different colors and within each color an almost infinite gradation of green, blue, yellow, red, and so on.

What comes first? Believes? Thoughts? Emotions? They are all interconnected and mutually reinforcing. A friend used to have books on emotional intelligence in her bookshelf (she reads also this blog at times). I always found that the two terms were contradicting each other: intelligence belongs to the realm of rationality, cause-effect thinking, almost by definition void of emotions. Emotions, on the other hand, belong to the realm of what is not rational, the often uncontrolled physical response to an event or a thought thorough a pang in the chest, cold sweat, the feeling of having the heart beating in the throat, trembling. Physical reactions which are triggered by an event or a thought.

I came now to realize how the three are interconnected and that emotional intelligence may be a way to describe in a quasi scientific way the links between believes, thoughts and emotions. It is a way to make sense of this complex relationships among the three.  Believes are defined not only by thoughts but a lot, depending on the individual, on emotions. Emotions are defined by our believes and thoughts. Our thoughts are closely related with emotions and believes. All this, I now realize, at times is difficult to manage and feels overwhelming.

It is funny to think that in the end this is all about each of us, how we are inside, how life influenced us and determined the ways we see and interpret it.  The link between believes, thoughts and emotions is like the colors I mentioned before, which are different for each individual. Some are more inclined to be influenced by emotions, others are more able to put their mind and thinking before emotions. We all build our believes in different ways depending on who we are and what life experiences we lived through. This make us different but at the same time all so similar. The difference being the gradation of colors through which we see reality. A little bit like the sunrise in Dumaguete pictured here, I am sure we all see the colors of it in a slightly different way for, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet , ‘nothing is bad or good, but our mind makes it so.’