“There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, led to one or another impulse to act.” Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman, who wrote the groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, purports that it is some other psychological assessment, other than IQ, which will determine future success.

I can see clearly that the impulses he is talking about include the bagel and muffin trays offered in my car dealership waiting area, or the too expensive shoes or the too young men or the rage that fills me when the asshole on the freeway cuts me off. Accommodating any of those impulses has no long term benefit; they are crack for the ego.

My concern, however, is the squashing of the other impulses, the ones that guide us to life-enhancing decisions. The impulse to express a truth even if it is unpopular. The impulse to say no, when social mores would have us say yes. The impulse to radically change a life that looks perfectly fine from the outside but feels like death on the inside.

I worry that we are losing our instinctive sense of ourselves and the world around us, relying more and more on experts and consensus and trends.

I recently read that we in the civilized west are losing our ability to feel hunger. Eating throughout the day, regardless of the situation, has become ubiquitous, hungry or not. The biochemical mechanism triggered by a drop in blood sugar is so rarely accessed that the resources are being transferred elsewhere. This scares me – the extreme manipulation of one of our survival mechanisms.

We’ve become the pleasure-and-comfort generation. Less about hard work or earning a reward, more about the shortcut, the workaround, the easy way out.

I am afraid that we will begin to live only in extremes, much like the stratification of our socioeconomic classes. We become like the addict, powerless over any whim or desire, or we become the ascetic who deems any impulse evil, and the control over our desires the mark of superiority.

Is it possible to live in the middle ground, where our impulses can go through a highly developed discernment filter and we honor all ways?

Can we become more finely tuned to the impulse that arises from our hearts and guts, while inviting the reactive mind to soften into the background?

Can we love our desires so vigorously that resistance becomes irrelevant?