“What an amazing word ‘heady’ is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.” – A.S. Byatt, Possession

I used to find opera faintly ridiculous.

I would sit there watching people onstage experiencing heartbreak, betrayal, jealousy, transcendence—everything turned up to eleven—and it all felt melodramatic, inflated, divorced from real life. No one actually behaves like that, I thought. No one really feels like that for that long.

And then, at some point, it flipped.

I got older. I lived more life. I experienced real loss, real rupture, real love that didn’t last, real reversals that arrived without warning. And suddenly opera didn’t feel exaggerated at all. It felt… accurate.

The crass way I sometimes put it is that life is mostly orgasms and shark attacks. There aren’t that many neutral beats. Opera doesn’t offer relief from that reality. It doesn’t cut away. It insists that this much is what it feels like to be alive.

I also came to appreciate that opera isn’t just about big events, or even about music. It’s about time. Opera stretches time. It dilates moments that, in real life, pass in seconds but contain entire inner universes.

Take the famous aria “Vissi d’arte” in Tosca. In the story, Tosca is under immediate threat. There is absolutely no realistic world in which she would pause for several minutes to articulate her feelings with such detail. And yet that’s exactly the point. The aria externalizes what would otherwise flash by internally: the pleading, the confusion, the sense of cosmic injustice, the bargaining with God. Music gives shape to the microstructure of emotion. Every ache, every turn of thought, every flicker of despair is sculpted and made audible.

That’s a lot of what opera does at its best. It allows us to experience the totality of emotion—not just the headline feeling (“sad,” “angry,” “in love”), but the fine-grained textures inside it.

There’s a line in the Al-Anon Promises that talks about coming to know “the vastness of our emotions.” I’ve always loved that phrasing. It’s not about intensity alone. It’s about range, every crayon in the box. At whisper volume and full tilt.

When emotion enters the room

I spend most of my professional life inside organizations. And in work contexts, I notice how often “emotional intelligence” gets talked about, but usually in a flattened, instrumental way. Emotions are treated as risks to manage, threats to dampen, or levers to pull. There’s very little curiosity about what emotions mean.

A small example.

I once worked with a CEO who was deeply attached to a particular vision for a startup pitch deck. It wasn’t working. Objectively. Over the course of months, we reached something like version sixty. The board was frustrated. The team was exhausted. And still, the CEO could not let go of this one approach.

At one point he said to me, very deliberately, “You need to know that I’m angry.”

I said, “Okay. I hear that.” And then I asked how he wanted to proceed.

I laid out my recommendation, which happened to align with what the board was already pushing for. He repeated, more sternly: “You need to know I’m angry.”

It was as if anger itself was meant to function as a threat, or a command, or a force of nature that should cause me to change course. Say the word, and the room should rearrange itself.

I didn’t experience it that way. I experienced it as information.

Years earlier, I’d had an executive coach who often said that anger means you’re not getting what you want. That’s it. No moral overlay. No drama.

I’ve found this incredibly useful. When I notice myself getting angry, I can pause and ask: What do I want that I’m not getting? And almost every time, the answer is something no one else can actually give me, but rather something I have to claim or create myself.

Seen that way, anger isn’t dangerous or destructive. Rather, it’s instructive. It points. It moves energy. It tells me where to act internally, not where to blame externally.

The CEO and I were clearly operating with very different emotional grammars. He was angry that I wasn’t reacting to his anger in the way he expected—though what that reaction was supposed to be was never articulated. For him, the emotion was the move.

For me, it was a data point.

Emotion as diagnostic intelligence

There’s a book I like a lot by Robert C. Solomon called The Passions. In a long index, emotion-by-emotion, Solomon tries to articulate what different emotions implicitly and logically indicate.

Hatred, for example. Solomon suggests that hatred arises from a combination of psychic proximity and deep ideological disagreement. That’s incredibly clarifying: hatred isn’t a verdict, it’s a signal. And signals are useful. If I hate someone, it means I’m close to them in some way, and we are fundamentally misaligned in values or worldview. From there, I have options. I can create actual or psychic distance. Or I can revisit the disagreement to find more common ground. 

The emotion stops being a verdict or weather pattern and becomes actionable intelligence.

Dan Siegel has called emotions “the music of the mind.” I like that formulation, especially if we take it seriously—music doesn’t have to be background. It doesn’t have to be suppressed. It doesn’t kill you. It can be loud or quiet, dissonant or resolving.

Suppressing emotion, by contrast, takes an enormous amount of energy. Even the word “emotion” carries the sense of motion. Something moving through. Often it’s smarter to let that movement happen—to stay with it—than to stand outside it trying to control or neutralize it.

Another anecdote.

I used to work with a leader who, implicitly and consistently, treats rising emotion on a team as evidence that something has gone wrong. When people get animated, upset, or charged, he slows everything down.

Over time, teams adapt to this logic. They learn—often unconsciously—that emotional expression functions as friction. If you want to halt momentum, you surface feeling. If you want more time, you lean into affect. Eventually, this becomes a game: how emotional is just emotional enough to interrupt forward motion without being called out?

The leader, meanwhile, experiences himself as emotionally intelligent. He is calm. He is regulated. He self-soothes. He meets the team where they are. But something else is happening beneath the surface. Emotion has been reframed as a problem to be neutralized rather than a signal to be metabolized. Equanimity becomes synonymous with flattening.

This reduces organizational speed. And it makes the group less smart.

---

Equanimity, as it’s traditionally understood in contemplative traditions, is not the absence of intensity. It’s an orientation toward intensity. It’s the capacity to remain present before emotions as they arise—not to downgrade them to a safe middle register.

Emotion, in this deeper sense, is not something we become intelligent about: it is one of the primary ways we become intelligent at all. It may not always be our best thinking, but it’s fast, clear, instructive, and shared.

When emotion is allowed to circulate—neither indulged theatrically nor suppressed in the name of professionalism—it becomes usable. It sharpens perception. It reveals where energy is pooling and where it’s stuck. It tells you what wants to happen next, even if it doesn’t tell you how.

Acknowledging emotion without trying to fix it or dissociate from it is uncomfortable work. It requires tolerating ambiguity, intensity, and vulnerability. But over time, it produces a system that can actually think—because it is no longer burning energy denying or blurring its own internal signals.

And when that happens—when feeling is treated as motion rather than obstruction—work stops being an exercise in control and becomes something closer to a chorus.

Lively, a bit unpredictable, but also connected. Energetic. And real.