From Sunny to Overcast… and Back Again
After a while, you begin to recognize the symptoms. It starts with a creeping sense of malaise, an irritation of the nerves, a vague discontent that gradually morphs into a definite state of anger or misery. Before you know it, you’re in the grip of a full-blown bad mood.
Sometimes a specific person or situation will serve as a trigger. Other times, you’re just engulfed in a general sense of gloom-and-doom about yourself and your life. Either way, from whichever blue or nearly blue skies you’ve been flying in, you find yourself in a tailspin.
The downward spiral can be almost enjoyable. Giving yourself over to low spirits can feel like sinking into a nest of twigs: prickly but comfortingly familiar. You’ve been here before. While you don’t welcome vexation and don’t exactly put out the welcome mat for the doldrums, they feel like old friends.
It’s so easy. The law of gravity says that it takes far less effort to fall down than to claw your way up again. Dropping into the arms of a bad mood is so much easier than disengaging yourself afterward. That’s because, once you’re in that negative mindset, glum thoughts will keep reinforcing it. Those thoughts can lead to memories of other bad times. As you start digging into your archive of old slights and remembered pain, you come up with additional reasons to be unhappy. And the cycle continues, growing stronger with each revolution…
It seems to me that happiness is harder to hold onto than discontent. Even the most elated moment can quickly give way under an onslaught of petty or not-so-petty annoyances. The joy of having your child become engaged, for example, is at risk of being buried under the thousand-and-one details of planning the wedding and its attendant festivities, any of which have the potential to snow you under with irritants and dissatisfactions. The memory of your poignant yearning for just such a scenario is crushed beneath gravity’s relentless heel. Soaring spirits start to sink.
And they can sink so quickly! Sometimes, as quickly as a thought. A fleeting thought that turns our mood right around, from sunny to overcast. Or an image, conjured up by our imagination. The yetzer hara loves to use dimyon, or imagination, to suppress our spirits. It knows that imagining a dire scenario is nearly as effective, in terms of casting our spirits down, as actually living through one.
Like the common cold, bad moods are underrated. Anyone who’s ever spent a sleepless night trying to breathe through a stuffy nose knows that a “mere” cold can bring plenty of suffering. In the same way, a “mere” bad mood can color our whole world black.
Suddenly, the color leaches out of our surroundings, turning the landscape into a dreary thing of black and white. Everything we see or hear scrapes against the raw membrane of our gloom. The lights are dimmed and the music of the world is muted.
Perpetual Smiles
There are some people who walk around wearing a perpetual smile. Just seeing them makes you want to smile back. But you wonder: do they mean it? Or is the smile just a mask they wear to face the world?
Are they actually as consistently happy as they appear? And, if so, how do they do it?
I suppose the answer is different for each person. The fact is, some of us are more prone to mood swings than others. Being extremely responsive to emotional stimuli is simply a part of our nature. The question is: how can we create a situation where gloom-and-doom is less than welcome, and happiness has a maximum chance of thriving?
A long time ago, on these pages, I described an old Indian parable about the two figurative wolves that live inside a person. One is the wolf of love, the other the wolf of fear. In the parable, a young boy asks his grandfather which of those inner wolves is stronger. To which the grandfather responds: “Whichever one you feed.”
We can go through our lives regarding the world, and those in it, through the eyes of love. Those eyes see imperfections, but quickly skip over them to get to the wonderful parts. They appreciate the struggles of others because they’ve experienced plenty of their own. Even when they feel depleted and impoverished, there’s one thing they know they can always offer: their love.
The wolf of fear makes us view others as our competitors for the biggest slice of the pizza of life. We perceive them as going after exactly what we feel we need, which puts them squarely in the “enemy” category. Instead of supporting others, we snarl at them.
Clearly, in the happiness sweepstakes, the wolf of love is by far the better bet. And if it presents itself in the guise of a perpetual smile at the world, so much the better!
A Matter of Focus
We don’t get to choose most of the factors that impact our lives. But we do get to choose which wolf, which pair of eyes, which attitude goes out to greet them.
The trick to halting a tailspin right in its tracks is, I think, simply a matter of focus.
One thing we can do, even in hard times, is to focus on the things in our lives that are big and good. For instance: our health, our marriages, our children, our satisfying jobs. Compared with them, most of our passing troubles will appear diminished in size, if not actually paltry. When suffering the sting of a paper cut, we can focus on the fact that we’re able to breathe and see and walk. It won’t take away the pain, but it will keep it from robbing us of our happiness.
Suppose some of the big things in our lives are not so good. What then?
In that case, we need to focus on the little things that are good… even if they seem dwarfed in size and scope by the bad things. Little good things can trump big, bad things, if we decide to let them. If we decide to focus our minds on them instead of on the terrifyingly huge problems that threaten to overwhelm us.
It also helps to remember to feed the wolf of love and pour our caring onto those around us. To give them the gift of happiness even when we’re not feeling it so much ourselves.
A shared treat, a pleasant interchange, a quick smile… these things can’t overset the troubles and travails that inevitably crash into every human life. They can’t make our troubles go away. But they can make them taste so much sweeter. And that sweetness has the power to keep our moods and spirits from sinking even when there’s good reason for them to do so.
We can focus on the good things, even if they’re small.
And we can remember to shower our love onto others with a free hand. There’s nothing that makes a person feel richer. Or happier!
