How Emotions Shape Our World.

Are we engaging in honest, compassionate communication when we talk to people about their health, or just spewing data? More importantly, are we listening?

If you go far enough out into space, the Earth looks like little more than a pale blue dot. Astronomer Carl Sagan said the following about such a picture of Earth, taken by Voyager spacecraft, in an excerpt from a 1996 commencement address.

That's home. On it...every hunter and forager...every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every...mother and father, every inventor and explorer...every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. Think of the rivers of blood spilled [to] become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

The delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe [is] challenged by this point of pale light... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

From this perspective, it’s hard, at first, to think that anything we do matters. Fortunately we have emotions. Seemingly at war with the cold logic of space, the color of emotion paints our world as far bigger than a mere dot. Logic assembles our experience as data and facts. Emotions, however, spin facts into stories.

Telling ourselves these stories we define realities that challenge meaninglessness. These are the realities of family, lovers, and friends. Our emotions expand the significance of these circles to become worlds in themselves.

Health care: world of confusion

Are we pushing out data or addressing people's emotions when we talk to them about health?

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