Emotional Intelligence Primer – Blog Post #359 by Asrar Qureshi

Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #358. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here.

 

Emotional Intelligence is about emotions. Though it is mostly studied in the context of work, but it is actually about feelings, personal and work. One major part is to be able to understand own self and its emotions because controlling these will bring control over others.

Medical explanation besides, Emotions are talked about with reference to heart. The following poem and pictorials come from the fav Brain Pickings.

The poem is apparently written and drawn for children, but it is equally, if not more, applicable to adults as well.

[quote]

“How is your heart?” I recently asked a friend going through a trying period of overwork and romantic tumult, circling the event horizon of burnout while trying to bring a colossal labor of love to life. His answer, beautiful and heartbreaking, came swiftly, unreservedly, the way words leave children’s lips simple, sincere, and poetic, before adulthood has learned to complicate them out of the poetry and the sincerity with considerations of reason and self-consciousness: “My heart is too busy to be a heart,” he replied.

How does the human heart — that ancient beast, whose roars and purrs have inspired sonnets and ballads and wars, defied myriad labels too small to hold its pulses, and laid lovers and empires at its altar — unbusy itself from self-consciousness and learn to be a heart? That is what artist and illustrator Corinna Luyken explores in the lyrical and lovely My Heart (public library) — an emotional intelligence primer in the form of an uncommonly tender illustrated poem about the tessellated capacities of the heart, about love as a practice rather than a state, about how it can frustrate us, brighten us, frighten us, and ultimately expand us.

 

MY HEART by Corinna Luyken

My heart is a window,
My heart is a slide.
My heart can be closed
or opened up wide.

Some days it’s a puddle.
Some days it’s a stain.
Some days it is cloudy
and heavy with rain.

 

Some days it is tiny,
but tiny can grow…
and grow…
and grow.

There are days it’s a fence
between me and the world,
days it’s a whisper
that can barely be heard.

There are days it is broken,
but broken can mend,
and a heart that is closed
can still open again.

 

My heart is a shadow,
a light and a guide.
Closed or open…
I get to decide.

[Unquote]

Concluded.