ABCs of Positivity: L Is for Love and Logic

Love / Logic – I tend to be fairly center-brained, meaning I balance my emotional, arty aspects with precision and problem-solving skills. Knowing when to use love and when logic is needed is an art many of us can learn.

ABCs of Positivity: L Is for Love & Logic

When it comes to handwriting analysis, the slant of one’s letters is indicative of emotionality. Using a 90° angle as your point of reference, straight up and down would indicate a person fairly devoid of emotional connection, meaning they’re probably extremely logical – like Spock. The further to the right the handwriting slants, the more the individual bases their decisions on emotion – and the less they tend toward logic. Writing that slants to the left could mean an introverted / antisocial person, or a leftie.

There is no right or wrong – we are who we are. But the people who write with a slight rightward slant tend to be the ones who get along with the widest variety of individuals because they can connect based on logic, when necessary, or emotion if that is called for.

Our words today, love and logic, while seemingly opposite in nature, are both important when it comes to living a positive life. Certainly there are times when love should be our overriding emotion, the one from which decisions are made. But if firefighters and surgeons, for instance, were to base their split-second decisions on emotions versus relying on their training and logic, emergency situations might have many more tragic endings.

Likewise, there are times when logic is called for – but sometimes we need to follow our hearts to the right conclusion.

I remember hearing a teacher I know talk about a situation that had occurred in her classroom the day she was telling this story. One little boy – a “known troublemaker” – was being closely monitored because he’d been acting up a lot. Common sense told me he had problems at home that weren’t being addressed – but that’s for another post. This particular day, the school had arranged for a few major league baseball players to come visit the students. Rather than going out on a field trip, the special event was coming to them.

Our little boy – let’s call him Steven – was trying hard to behave, but his emotions got the best of him and he acted up again, pretty severely. So as a punishment, he was the only student not allowed to go meet the ballplayers. My teacher acquaintance viewed this as a victory – she’d finally had a chance to put Steven in his place. This was a 50-year-old woman, a mother, a long-time teacher who had won awards. My jaw was on the floor. How could she have been so blind and missed such an amazing opportunity to help this little boy? This kid – the one who was not allowed to meet the sports heroes – was probably the one child who needed most to meet them.

I think of this as a situation where both logic and love were lacking. In my research for this post, the first page of results for “love and logic” all pertain to parenting books, classes, and skills – so it appears I’m not the only one who believes a bit of both are called for in these kinds of situations.

Love allows for compassion – we can put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. Logic allows us to solve the problems – the other person caused a problem and now I must fix it.

Love is a crazy broad topic – as there are so many kinds of love and ways to express and experience it. For the sake of this post, let’s agree that all are important, but we’re really focused on the general feeling or sense of love for self and others. You may have heard this described as agape love. Stemming from the Greek, agape is love that focuses on goodwill, benevolence, and willful delight in the person (or pet or place) receiving the love.

Guess what. The way to experience and express more agape love in your life are the exact same things we recommended yesterday to experience more kindness:

Smile more often.
Say please and thank you, and mean it.
Listen, without assuming.
Speak truthfully.
Stay in neutral instead of forming judgments.
Give without expectation.
Receive gracefully.
Take a moment to genuinely care about the person next to you.

If you’re strong in love but feel you would benefit by strengthening your logic skills, here are a few things to try:

Make time for creative pursuits. This may seem counterintuitive, but creative pursuits require the integrated use of both the right (emotional) and left (logical) sides of your brain.
Ask questions about things you don’t know or understand. Why does the sewing machine keep getting stuck? Why do my tomato plants do better on one side of the garden than the other? Do the research to find the answers.
Spend time socializing with other people – especially those who operate differently from you.
Decide to acquire a new skill. Fix your own sink clog. Change a tire. Sew a button on a shirt. Reupholster a chair. Attach a soundbar speaker to your TV. Learn a new sport.
Take some time to analyze your thought process. How do you move from one thought to another? Consider the potential outcomes of some of your recent decisions. How might things have turned out if you’d made a different decision?
Read in subject matters you don’t usually read.
Find some logic puzzles online and solve them. Start with the simple ones. If you’re stumped, look at the answers and reverse-engineer the situation to discover how to arrive at the solution.

Sometimes logic shows up as common sense – and there seems to be an overwhelming shortage of that right now. But alternately, sometimes love shows up as common sense – and we seem to be dealing with the aftermath of our collective forgetting how to love first and question, accuse, argue second.

You can make a powerful, positive difference for yourself and the others in your life by just slowing down and taking the time to discern whether each situation calls for love, logic, or both.

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Laura Orsini is an author, speaker, consultant, publisher, and creator of Fairy Positive, an antidote to the worries of the world. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.