Rocking Chair

In the classroom of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, emotions were naturally, as well as artificially, stimulated, while tradition and social norms were either ignored or violated. For some, values, all values, were put under the lens of social criticism, while for others, this criticism significantly changed—sometimes destroying—their lives.

Today, as a second option to rocking in my rocking chair (Hoagy Carmichael’s song Rocking Chair made popular by Maria Muldaur comes to mind here), I will blog/write about some of the significant emotional events that propelled me down life’s highway; and further, I will give these emotional events a musical identity. I think (hope) these recollections (memories plucked from my old journals) will be entertaining (sharing them is my entertainment). To begin, here are two thought provoking and complementary ideas concerning both the nature and the potential of life-changing emotional events; the first comes from a psychologist, and the second of which comes form a philosopher/mathematician:

Rationality is grounded in emotion, the emotive content of our environment. That is why the psychologist, Morris Massey, can say, “…by age ten, significant emotional events have already pre-determined who we will be for the rest of our lives.”

In Whitehead’s philosophy, experience reduces to what he calls occasions, and, insofar as occasions conform to their environment, insofar as “self-aim” conforms to its immediate past, there is determinism, but insofar as any entity modifies its response through the subjective element of feeling, there is freedom. Feeling and freedom are codependent for Whitehead and acting on “good feelings” moves the world forward to a better place.