"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."

– Jean-Paul Sartre

Emotions are pesky things, aren’t they? They are unpredictable: the exact same situation that sends me over the edge in a full-blown rage can elicit a calm sense of purpose and the challenge of "solving the problem" for another. What makes me smile and start analyzing what components of a human’s behavior are causing a particular action ("Why did that person expect to accomplish by calling me a bastard and shooting me a middle-finger salute?") can cause another to become enraged, vengeful and, even, physically violent. We can say to ourselves a thousand times, "I am not going to let that jerk make me angry ever again!" and, before you can turn around three times and click your heels, you are boiling over again at the same jerk for the same offense. Or, you can be enraptured by "falling in love" only to have the object of your affection tear out your heart, break it over your head and do the Cotton-Eyed Joe over its remains. Gathering whatever splinters of dignity you can find among the ruins, you may solemnly swear to "never allow yourself" to fall in love again. And, then, like the swallows to Capistrano, eventually you fly back into the arms of a new "perfect love".

These patterns of emotions can lead one to several suppositions:

1. We seem to have absolutely no control over the mysterious origins of our emotions. I say "seem to" because I am of the opinion that there are exceptions; more on that later.

2. Emotions almost seem to have a rhythm of their own, like the tides of the ocean or the spawning of salmon. Try as we will, sometimes they simply overwhelm our best intentions and our staunchest attempt to suppress them.

3. Emotions are Janus-faced: that is, some bring us joy and make us feel energized, excited and alive and others snatch whatever sanity we may have left and cause us to act in ways we would never dream we could act without the igniting spark of our emotions.

4. Finally, emotions - and probably our inability to fully and completely harness them - are one of the major components in our wiring that make us human. I do not deny that lower (a word I use with tongue firmly planted in cheek) animals display outward signs of what we might think of as "emotions" (anger, rage, love, jealousy, et al) but I do not think they are as mentally-driven and complex as those of our species and are more instinct-driven. But, then, who knows what two dogs are thinking about when they fight or copulate? Mister Spock of Star Trek fame is easily identified by viewers as not human because he simply has no emotions; without them, we are somehow stripped of our humanity.

I find emotions particularly fascinating as they have been a predominant force in my life for most of it. I seem to be one of those people with an adrenalin reserve the size of the Arabian oil fields and a hair-trigger (and hyperactive) release mechanism. For the first half-century of my life, I could "go hot" with the a single word, look or even the prospect of an ill wind. I remember the dry mouth, fast heart rate and sweaty palms as constant companions in my academic years as the fear of being called on in class constantly loomed like the birds on the schoolyard in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie. I remember the hurt I felt from people who, probably without even knowing it, crushed my hopes, my fantasies or my unceasing quest for approval.

I was driven, for most of my life, by equal parts testosterone and adrenalin all the time. And, for those who are unfamiliar with this deadly cocktail, it is not conducive to long life or peaceful demeanor. While I don’t think I was actually manic-depressive, one might have easily made that diagnosis. My emotional states varied like the swing of a pendulum. One minute mellow; the next, volcanic. Fortunately for my teeth and facial structure, I was not one to physically act out my anger but, Lordy Mercy!, my verbal tirades would, as one account described General Washington’s dressing down of General Charles Lee (Battle of Monmouth), "shake the very leaves from the trees." Of course, afterwards, I would suffer from the usual accompaniments of epinephrine overload - pounding temporal headache, racing pulse, sweating and overall sense of overwhelming and unfulfilled rage and, yes, embarrassment that I allowed myself to be so "out of control".

But, as I have said, emotions are part and parcel of us all and are, to a large degree, what make us fully human. Thus, we are stuck with them. It is not necessarily true that we become more in control of our emotions as we mature but I do believe emotions evolve with experience. I still get angry but, since my testosterone is distinctly on the decline and my adrenalin reserves are measurably depleted, the outbursts are neither as frequent or as bombastic. I am still quite capable of having my feelings hurt but I seem to recover more quickly and have learned to make a conscious effort to understand if what I perceived as intentional was, in actuality, just my imagination rather than ill-will.

Some emotions, conversely, seem to intensify as I have aged: compassion, sympathy, empathy - call it what you will. I seem to feel the suffering of others more acutely and am more moved by the omnipresent cruelty of man’s inhumanity to man and nature’s creatures. I understand it less and mourn it more deeply. I am measurably more sentimental as well. For instance, I have been known to tear up at some commercials, for Heaven’s Sake, and more than a few scenes in movies, reactions that would have horrified me in my younger days. But, in my observations, that seems to be almost universal among the elderly population. Its roots are probably many and varied and need not be enumerated here.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that "Emotions are our way of magically transforming the world". I agree with him. A classic example is Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes. After failing to acquire his prize, the fox walks dejectedly away and thinks: "They were probably sour anyway", thus the origins of the term "sour grapes". His emotional response - disappointment, dejection, sense of failure - allowed him to "magically" (the grapes remained just as they were) transform them from something desired to something just not worth the effort. The disappointment and failure, likewise, were magically morphed into "I am such a smart fox to be able to recognize bad grapes from sweet grapes just by a glance!".

Sadly, many people, particularly, the young, are very much like Aesop’s fox. Some young people who are" thrown into the world" (Martin Heidegger‘s phrase) in poverty, inner city crime, fatherless homes and incompetent school systems become very much like the fox. They come to see the world as cruel, violent and unforgiving. Without anything or anyone to teach them the truth, they come to believe they have no chance for any semblance of success. So, like the quest for the grapes, they ask themselves: "Why bother trying"?. They are "too smart" to buy into all that "American Dream" bullshit. And, thus, they sink into the easier world that lies before them - promiscuity, drugs and violence. They have, in essence, "magically transformed their world", just like the "wise" fox. Their perception becomes their reality. The lethal, negative, dead-end emotions of anger, frustration, and hopelessness become "hip", "fly," (I am dating myself here) and "cool". The acceptance of their circumstances drive their transmogrified emotions to self-destruction, prison or murder being their final destinations.

The truth of the matter is that we are not, as some would have us believe, "products of our environments" or slaves to our emotions and our passions. If we choose to be blindly driven by our emotions, we might easily buy into that prevailing alibi and self-justification for nonparticipation in civilized society that says "he just never had any other choice" or "society let him down". The fact of the matter is, we always have choices. We are products of the character we elect to cultivate and how we decide to view the possibilities of our circumstances. If we choose to understand and, with that, gain some control over our passions, we can begin to see the world as it really is: anything we believe it to be.

Passions - from the Greek pathea or "to suffer" - will always be part of our humanity. At times our emotions, our passions if you will, can cause us to act foolishly, even to ruination; at other times, they might raise us to the heights of creativity and ecstacy. They are imbedded in all of us and no one is exempt from their sway. But, at the same time, their variations and particular (and, for some of us, peculiar) admixtures, give each of us our character and our uniqueness among our fellow Homo sapiens.

Never, however, should they be thought of as excuses for anything.