12 - Lives and Change

Summary

In undertaking this work, we have immersed ourselves in the splendid, unfolding, and confounding detail of three men's lives. Each man's life, his loves, his ambitions, his accomplishments, and his defeats have become not only a part of our work, of how we view emotion, but also of ourselves. The paths of their lives have altered the paths of our lives. Of course, in a mundane sense, it is always true that what you work on becomes you, means become ends, as we have said before. Because of that, we are even more thankful that these three lives are easy to respect, that the men are easy to be charmed by and attracted to, and that the ideas they leave behind are so compelling and still sometimes refreshing.

At the beginning of this psychological examination of three individuals' personal and work lives, we were fixed largely on adding information about emotion to the major developmental theories of our time – we were fixed on filling in the emotion gap. We began our project thinking about emotion almost as a distinct part of the human being. To be a genius at emotion, we thought, was to have mastered that compartment of life. One would detect emotion, understand emotion, manage emotion, and manipulate one's own and other's emotions efficiently. However, the emotional data from just three lives speaks of and tells us far more than we expected. The management of emotion, while still interesting, is almost incidental.