Emotion vs Logic: the Struggle for Sanity.

The other day I watched the “Defiant Ones”  on Net Flix .  It’s a docuseries about Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine.

These guys are two of the most influential music producers/engineers/ moguls of the 21st century.  They became business partners and created Beats head phones, then sold it to Apple. 

It was a pretty big deal. 

The series is pretty incredible.  However, this isn’t a review, but a recognition of the emotional importance of feeling and positive energy.

See, there’s a scene late in the series where Dr. Dre is sitting at a piano discribing how he operates.  He basically says that he runs and operates on emotion, gaging the energy of the individuals he meets and works with.  It’s always got to be positive.  If it gets screwy even slightly he’s out.

As he explained the concept, it dawned on me.  All the moments of termoil and success in my life where fueled by the energy that I allowed to surround me.  Whether good or bad I chose to let that energy influence the emotional undertone of my own existence.  A primal sense of influence, surroundings and associations.  If it felt good it prospered, when the focus curved away from that energy things started to get squirly and go bad. 

The connection I have to that mentality is more familiar than I had recognized.  Something clicked when he said (I am paraphrasing here) “if it doesn’t feel right, good or great” than he doesn’t do it.  Then he talked about the mentality of an artist.

An artist wants to be able to create.  Make their art and work through the progression of what that art will become.  They want to control it, build it, complete it, withought someone over their shoulder trying to push the birth of it. 

I thought, damn that seems alot like personal growth and self reflection.  We work on ourselves to be better us’s.  We take in the influences we find necessary to change, discarding the negatives that keep peering over our shoulders interjecting and distracting us from our vision.  Hoping to get as close to our percieved level of perfection as possible, then when we’re comfortable with what we’ve produced, we unveil it to the world.

I feel 100% like an artist… if that’s the criteria. 

I ride on emotion, I try my best to keep it in check, but that’s also what makes me, me.  The confines of a structure are great and secure for most.  For me it induces anxiety a sense of being trapped and to a certain extent, the feeling that I’m giving up on life.  In the past, I’d push through the  anxiety and frustration because logically It was the right move.  Over time I’d get balled up and a few months down the road, an explosion of creativity, unfocused and barfed into the world.

It’s what happens when you aren’t living true to you.  At least that’s what I believe.  I’ve always felt there has to be a better way for me to exist, something that suits me for what I am. 

There’s room for all of us to find what we want and need, it just takes a little self reflection and emotional evaluation to really feed those desires and expectations.  Be the artist and the art.