You need two to tango

They stand face to face. Walk towards each other .When their eyes meet they know they are ready and the music starts to play. The audience is amazed by how synchronised they look. The man leads, but it would be graceless without her hooks and eights. All of this, blend together in the typical argentinian TANGO music.

Thoughts and feelings dance together, but you couldn’t do without them both taking turns to lead. What do I mean by this?  Thoughts and feelings complement each other, when you think too much, there’s no room for emotions to flow. Imagine you are walking on your own on a dark alley at night. You hear footsteps behind you. Your heart starts beating faster, your hands are shaking and covered in sweat. You are afraid and run all the way to the next block where you see light. At that moment, out of danger, you realize you were afraid that someone would hurt you and decided to run. Two minutes before, you couldn’t have put your feelings into words because your emotions overwhelmed you and that was the way it could have been. If you were to start thinking instead of running I wonder what would have happened to you. Maybe you could have turned around and you would have realized the “supposed footsteps” were some shutters banging with the wind….However you could have also turned around to face a dangerous murderer pointing at you with a gun and in that case it would be too late!

There’s a link between emotion action and thought. Every event that defines an action either follows or will be followed by both an emotional response and a thought.

You are sad or angry and accidentally you shout to your mother; then you start thinking about it and how wrong you were. Here we have a FEELING, ACTION, THOUGHT link. Otherwise this “chain: could start with the action; so, you shout to your mother, you think about it and then you feel sorry afterwards. Finally everything can start with a thought, for example thinking your mum might be upset because of how you treated her; then it it followed by an action as you go and talk to her and finally you feel better after exchanging a few words with her and saying sorry.

Sometimes it’s the emotion who’s leading the way, and this is more evident when we let go of all rational thought and act impulsively. The best example that comes to mind would be that 5 cm above the floor feeling you get when you are in love. Of course, then comes the fall. And no matter how many times we hit the ground, there we go again!

I refuse to think that we are irrational beings, but then again, why do we behave as if logic didn’t matter when we should be the most careful? We know that falling in love actually includes Falling, and we keep on doing so! 

Yet, the only thing that really differentiates us from other species is the fact that we have the chance to choose and not to act upon mere instinct, so I must conclude that the whole process of balancing our thinking and rational self with our emotional being is not without purpose.

After all, we do need two to tango.