The Living~Dying Duet: Other Duets in My Life
Many Things That We Take as Opposites in our Lives are Duet Dances such as the Thinking~Feeling Duet
My life has become a Living~Dying Duet. Following my dementia diagnosis my Living and my Dying are both very present for me, and I realized that they are not separate but rather dancing together in a Duet.
Are there other seeming opposites in my life that are dancing a Duet, and for which I am playing the music? With my awareness of the Living~Dying Duet I found several other seeming opposites that are actually dancing Duets in my life. Let's look quickly at one of them: the Thinking~Feeling Duet.
No sooner do we start to consider the Thinking~Feeling Duet than the lopsided nature of this dance jumps out, with Thinking leading Feeling throughout the dance. Our habits of expression include phrases such as "let me think about it" which is common, whereas "let me feel about it" is unheard. Many of the basic activities of our society such as engineering and mathematics are considered very much thinking-oriented. Our language itself is a source of Duet-discrimination -- there are massive references to Mindfulness, whereas Feelingfulness is almost non-existent and only appears in a few places such as at Feelingfulness.com.
Even with these realities, as soon as we consider it as the Thinking~Feeling Duet we are playing different music than accepting the existing role of each. Here are some of the things that happened to me as Early-Stage Dementia led me to pay attention to my Thinking~Feeling Duet:
an extraordinary amount of noise comes in through my Thinking. "Noise" is anything that comes from outside of me -- entertainment, politics, commercials, sports, religion, and many others -- and tries to make itself part of who I am. I became very aware of this as my capacity for thinking went down, my input overload went up, and the amount of noise coming into my brain was limited by my condition. I actually felt released from all the noise that had been coming in.
Thinking can connect directly with feeling based on how it is presented. When "Thinking" information such as text, numbers, lists, etc. is presented in ways that relate to my Feeling, such as by expressing it as a story, graphically, or through senses, the Thinking~Feeling Duet is dancing to music they can both relate to.
my Feeling can tell my Thinking a lot. My Feeling often tells me how I truly relate to something, in ways my Thinking doesn't. I've come to rely on my Feeling quite a lot for this.
language can be used as part of the song that's played for the Thinking~Feeling Duet. By consciously using both types of statements, such as "what do you think about that" and "what do you feel about that" I became more aware of and played more appropriate music for the Thinking~Feeling Duet
Feeling was coming from inside me while Thinking was coming from things outside of me, so I felt that my Feeling was a more authentic expression of myself.
I very much believe in balance in the Thinking~Feeling Duet, not that either one should dominate the other. Since I've paid attention to the Thinking~Feeling Duet I've come closer to that balance for me.