“Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” – Albert Einstein
Moods. Moody. I’m in a, “Fill in the blank,” mood. “She’s in a bad mood today.” “How are you?” (mood)
My mood is like an emotional thread that weaves through my life for a while. Mood is the great destroyer of the no-self theory. There’s at least a temporary self in time, one that experiences and returns to something called “Mood” over which it has no control. One that experiences this sticky mood over minutes, hours, days, months or years. Who is it that experiences mood over time? Who is it that “knows” what mood it’s in?
Mood is enmeshed in how I’m experiencing life and is contingent on the 10,000 things that are occurring around me. Mood is tied to food and water. Mood is impacted by weather. By people. By location. Vitamins, financial or emotional upheavals, politics, and sometimes mood is created by feelings of being ignored or having too much attention. Not wanting, creates a mood, wanting, creates a mood.
Moods are sticky little buggers. It’s as though the mood attaches and grasps onto me, no need to try to hold onto a mood. Getting rid of one is challenging.
Sometimes moods can change, but much slower than those frisky emotions. Emotions can dance over moods. I can be sad and yet enjoy moments of smiles and laughter, but if my mood is based in sadness, when I stop smiling, when I stop laughing, my system immediately returns to it’s baseline mood. I laugh and smile until I leave the room, the smile flattens out, or on days that are darker, flips upside down.
Mood is my sea anchor. My temporary outpost. Mood can easily be the outfit of the day that I wear with emotional accessories changing constantly over the mood.
It’s important, for me, to examine mood in the mornings and evenings. How I wake, and how I retire, can set a mood for the next day or the day I’m experiencing. If I remember to access my mood and pay attention, I have the opportunity to start moving, distracting, and recalibrating in the hopes of shifting the current mood. Mood has a lot of inertia that needs to be overcome for it to shift.
Yesterday I was excited and a little nervous. I was going in for some testing and hoping for some clarity on a medical problem. I woke up in a positive, slightly nervous mood. But during the exam, while the doctor was speaking he suddenly stopped mid sentence, looked at his phone for ten seconds, and proceeded to text something back to somebody, and then turned to the conversation. No explanation. No apology. As though my medical issues were suddenly on the back burner, replaced by whoever was texting. In attention I felt the mood of excitement and anticipation melt and become heavy, and my mood plummeted, just that fast. Whatever “relationship” I might have developed with said doctor vanished, and I wanted to get away from this distracted human.
No self, no problem! Right spiritual people? Or remember that this poor overpaid physician is just reacting from social conditioning. Be compassionate, you wonderful forgiving Bodhisattva! Or we’re all perfect just as we are. Or, there’s nothing wrong with anything. Or, or, or. But emotions over ride intellect, and being discounted results in an instantaneous REACTIVE state. I can purposefully act polite over it, pretend to be kind and caring, but that’s the external act, not the internal reactive experience. The internal experience responds with, “F%#K this asshole.” Or something like that. I will never be a Bodhisattva, unlike lots of enthusiastic meditators, who are mindfully being mindful and Bodhisattva-ing away. Maybe they don’t have moods.
NO HUMAN RESPONDS WELL TO BEING IGNORED OR DISCOUNTED. And no, I don’t know that for sure. But the few hundred examples I’ve noticed over a lifetime give a lot of support to that theory. People kill people if they feel discounted enough. Look at school shootings. Or, countries.
My emotional drift turned to sadness for a while, my overall mood, low. And it took several hours for the mood to lift, and despite having some joy rising in various moments, the mood persisted. But, I know something I never knew before, and that’s to simply KEEP GOING. Despite the mood, or fleeting emotions, despite life not unfolding the “right way.” When caught up in the tide, don’t struggle, go in the direction of life’s flow, and keep going. The tide will carry me to a new area, where other things unfold. Flowing with, saves energy. It’s a really big tide.
Good advice for these challenging times, Keep Going, and perhaps the only skillful way to move from mood to mood, from emotion to emotion, and from moment to moment.
More will be revealed.
Bryan Wagner
Visions of a People's Dharma 