The appetites, passions, and emotions are non-tangible, non-dimensional, immeasurable realities that are hard to define with English words (or French words or any words). They lead us to life as well as they lead us to death. They may hurt us when not operative as well as they may hurt us when executed. The process of maturing in life entails gaining stability, control, and direction of our appetites, emotions, and passions. Like any developmental process, this is best started when we are young. However parents, teachers, and pastors may not know how to help their wards in this respect. One reason is that many of us adults don’t know what to do with our own appetites, emotions, and passions, or do not even recognize them or their importance in our lives.
Psychology Dictionary describes appetite in two ways: “1. a desire to satisfy one’s need for food most typically, but can refer to any other physiological need. Appetite is both innate or learned and therefore malleable to modification through experience. 2. a state of wanting or longing, which may lead one to search for satisfaction and result in a consummaiory response” (https://psychologydictionary.org/appetite/). Catholic Encyclopedia describes appetite as: “A tendency, an inclination, or direction.”
We all have common appetites and unique appetites. Uniqueness can be in magnitude or expression. Some appetites are physiological such as appetite for food, drink, sex, etc. Some are mental such as curiosity and appetite for knowledge, learning, creativity or innovation. Some are spiritual such as appetite for prayer, worship, relationship, bonding, etc. These are innate appetites, common to humans. They may lie fallow or they may be operative; they may be static or active. There are appetites that are learned such as love for money, status, wealth, titles, qualifications, and religion and they vary from culture to culture or from one geographical region to another or from one time in history to another time in history. Appetites do us much good but are often the sources of society’s ills such as conflict, corruption, and war. How much good our appetites do for us or for others depends on our intellectual and spiritual levels.
Passion is our life force influencing the world. It is a spontaneous motivation to attain a real or an apparent good or to avoid a real or apparent evil. A passionate killer thinks he needs to kill, an apparent good for him. If our life force is good, we achieve good in the world. If our life force is evil, we achieve evil in the world. What forms our passion as good or evil are our intellect and spirit. Passion belongs to the living. The more fully alive one is, the more passionate one can be. Thus, people who are starving, miserable, wanting, lazy, ignorant, naïve, are generally not the change agents of civilization. A person’s accomplishment reflects how much life (bodily, mental, or spiritual) that person has.
The emotions are reactions of our consciousness to the environment: the weather, persons, places, events, colour, light, smell, music, etc. The consciousness works along the line of love and hate and all our emotions are expressions of love and hate. The emotions that are expressions of love are generally regarded as positive emotions and the emotions that are expressions of hate are generally regarded as negative emotions. They all influence are mental states, physiologic states, development, actions, relationships, and works.
Tyng and others in their review: “The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory” published in Frontiers in Psychology – Emotions Science in August 2017 state that: “Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior”.
Emotions can limit us or enhance us. A person who is all day angry because his or her spouse cheated is possibly wasted all day – unable to think correctly, unable to work well, unable to relate well, or unable achieve what he or she should achieved that day. A person who is angry because of an unjust process becomes an activist that gets the process changed. We need to stop our emotions from destroying us or other people. We need to let our emotions work for our good and the good of others.
Dr. Theresa Adebola John is a lecturer at Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM) and an affiliated researcher at the College of Medicine, University of Tennessee, Memphis. For any comments or questions on this column, please email bolajohnwritings@yahoo.com or call 08160944635