As a person whose political views center around ways to foster peace, harmony, fairness, and nature, I’ve been struggling lately with all the things there are to feel terrible about in our difficult and unpeaceful world. I disapprove of so many things. I deplore, dislike, even despise a growing number of things, all of which fill me with dismay. In short, I’m mired in the D words.
As I was thinking this morning about yet another thing that makes me feel lousy, there came, out of the blue, this thought: I’m not required to have opinions. And I thought about this, because on the one hand, it’s true and I would probably be calmer if I didn’t; on the other hand, I would feel like an unfeeling creep not to have them. Shouldn’t I care? Shouldn’t I show that I care by forming opinions and stating them?
I’m not sure. Because around the same time I started questioning the necessity of opinions, I also started thinking about why I have opinions and what an opinion — usually a variation on “good” or “bad” — means. As with judgments of any kind, there is almost always some emotion attached. You have to feel something to form an opinion about it. Otherwise, you might say, as we often do: I don’t know enough about that to have an opinion about it.
This is clearly not the case with most people about most things. In my case, I do care, which is why I have feelings which turn into opinions. And I guess if you get right down to it, my opinions may be spurring me to speak about my opinions with the covert aim of bringing about some kind of change. It’s a heck of an unconscious process, when you really get down to it.
I’ve since decided that, rather than not having opinions at all, I should simply try not to let opinions (and the emotions that accompany them) rule my life. This would allow me to improve my mood, despite the fact that everything sucks. After all, I have to be here until I’m not. May as well make the best of it.
And that was today’s unexpected lesson — every day, a new adventure in coping with chaos…
