The School of Life: An Emotional Education: An Emotional Education

to teach people how to be calm and brave in the face of overwhelming anxiety and pain.

what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects – and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very littl

We should at all points spare ourselves the burden of loneliness. We are far from the only ones to be suffering. Everyone is more anxious than they are inclined to tell us. Even the tycoon and the couple in love are in pain. We have collectively failed to admit to ourselves how much anxiety is our default state.

Much of what destroys our lives can be attributed to emotions that our conscious selves haven’t found a way to understand or to address in time.

For most of human history, emotional intelligence was – broadly – in the hands of religions. It was they that talked with greatest authority about ethics, meaning, community and purpose. It was they that offered to instruct us in how to live, love and die well. Religions were natural points of reference at times of personal crisis; in agony, one ge

It is a distinctive quirk of our minds that few of the emotions we carry in them are properly acknowledged, understood or truly felt.