Often, we’ll find ourselves in situations that we cannot make sense of.

At first, the reaction one can expect is an emotional one.

When people cannot make sense of something, the automatic reaction is that some kind of emotion will appear. It helps to make sense of the situation. The emotion in this case will be linked to memories that seem to be similar to the given situation. They thus serve as an orientation. Naturally, there is no guarantee that our intuition chose a situation from the archive we call experience that matches the current situation.

Thus, it helps to question the emotion and its reference. But as we are used to such mechanisms, we’ll probably take the meaning from the emotion and its reference. We’ve reconnected a situation with the story we tell ourselves.

This is why learning to find a time span between the stimulation and our response can help us choose a reaction that may or may not follow the emotion that appeared.

Either we continue to build a meaning based on the old experience, or we find a new meaning that we can develop.

It is an opportunity to choose if appearing emotions become a teacher or not.

With the given pace of change, situations we cannot make sense of will continue to appear. Experience may need to develop a way to keep up the pace. And it might very well be, that emotions can show the way.