A friend was not helped by her husband’s exclamation first thing in the morning:”Damn it’s morning.” According to her, he also said on going to bed, “Damn, it’s night.”
I was surprised to read in Emotional Awareness by Paul Eckman and the Dalai Lama that a world authority on emotions and their expression put so much emphasis on moods. As with many books, I haven’t gotten too far in it but I gather that the existence and cause of moods are a puzzle to researchers. We sometimes say that we got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning to explain a generally negative cast to a day that seems to have no good justification for one.
When I try, I can usually figure out why I am grouchy. It has to do with fear or incomplete jobs. I am afraid of this or that and I have stored the consciousness of that fear in the back of my mind. Or, I haven’t taken out the trash or paid a bill and that is a burr under my saddle.
I am guessing that it is unrealistic to expect happy moods or even equanimity all the time. That ol’ suffering is to be expected. I guess when I think about it, finding the cause of a negative mood does more or less enable me to shelf it, or dissolve it. Of course, sometimes there is an action I can take to eliminate it, too.
I guess it is interesting that I don’t try to find the cause or ways to modify positive moods. I have read a little of Voltaire and his Dr. Pangloss, the character who glosses over everything whistling and smiling and repeating to himself that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is fine and for the best. It is difficult to be sure that isn’t true but our human hearts are pretty damned sure it isn’t, with or without proof.
I read that we need silence to appreciate song and speech. All our senses need contrasts, rests and refreshing. So, the negatives, the recitations of the world’s dark sides, the awareness of pain are part of lives, too. I guess you can’t have life without death, good without bad, the negatives actually make the positives possible. I guess.
