Moods - what are they good for?

There have been recent experiments in psychology that support the notion that sadness has value. Namely that we see and remember things with greater clarity and precision.

I heard this on a  Margaret Throsby interview. With the popularity of Positive psychology, some researchers wondered if there was a point to being sad. There seems to be evidence that says that in evolutionary terms, sadness is important.

Sadness lets us take a new look at things around us as we don’t feel safe enough to trust the way things are at the moment and we will sharpen up our mindfulness in order to navigate through possible threat and danger.

Happiness, on the other hand, tells us that our world is safe and we can trust in the ways things are. And so we don’t pay attention nearly as much and are more likely to operate on automatic, possibly missing something important.

In broad terms, sadness helps us change direction while happiness will help us to follow our routines.

The researchers are not talking about depression here, but simple common place sadness over the usual staff that comes and goes. Life really.

The researchers found people while a little sad, had better memories of what was going on around them, than did happy people.

All of this comes as a surprise to me. I always thought that being happy was the all in all, and now I’m finding that other moods are perfectly fine and that all of them have value.

So there it is. Moods and emotions. All good as far as I can tell. Perhaps as long as there are ups and downs and you don’t get stuck in only one kind of mood, things are as they should. 

Paul

The ocean is big

The ocean is big. Really big. Some would say it’s huge, and you won’t get an argument from me on that account. Not that anyone has opened an ocean account. I mean why would they? Anyway the ocean  is this big wet thing. It has no borders, save the ones we put on it. You know,  the Indian one, and the Baltic, Pacific and so one. But really all just one great big moist wet watery thing. You know, the thing with all the fish.

So this water represents the oneness of life. Do you see that. All that water, currents, waves, spray and so on…all just one undivided body of water. But …and here’s the weird bit, it’s also a lot of individual waves going about their individual way, not at all acting like an ocean. And currents. Don’t get me started on currents. All of that hither and thither, being warmer and colder, strong ones and weak. And rips. Dangerous things rips. Not at all nice. And they all seem to act so dementedly and determinedly  individual…or so it seems.

And mist rising from crashing waves. Completely on their own. Amazing. Totally random man! All these separated individual bits that when you look at them and try to get meaning out of it, seems so chaotic.

There is even a thing called Chaos Theory, that goes like this. There is a pattern or a design inside chaos that moves about so seemingly random that whatever is really going on, remains hidden. Recently a computer was used to see if you could plot a seemingly chaotic movement. They used some sort of electromagnetic wave, and as you’d expect, the computer was able to do what the human eye could not. It picked up a predictable pattern. Imagine that, Chaos can be read.

Now follow me here, our life on Earth, remember that large round thing we step all over without wiping up after?  Well we see lots and lots of individual bits of life [that’s the chaos you see] and then spend lots more time attempting with some minor success to make sense of it all. That’s the way it is with waves, even the little ones. It’s really hard work, all this “what’s it all about” malarkey.

Another way to go, is to see the ocean. In it’s undivided state and not  wavy. It makes another kind of sense. Doing this, and I’m not saying that it’s easy cause it’s not. Not in our training you see. Got to train to see the Forrest and not just the trees. Moving from water now to wood, ah well.

The ocean, or Forrest…anything with a largish whole e ness,  gets to be seen in a different way. Maybe even the brain functions differently, who knows? Certainly  the old tribal people were used to seeing wholeness first, Oceananity if you will. I think I’ve just invented a new word. “Oceananity”  Break out the Champagne …pop, fizz!

Even as little as fifty years ago families in their houses, were often three generations crammed in. One big happy family a whole lot of the time. The people in the street were our extended family. Neighbors, friends, leaning over the fence having a natter. And so the wholeness spread. Maybe today there is soooo much wavy-ness, that so much activity seems chaotic, with only a few people making much sense of it.

The ocean’s wholeness provides….well everything we would ever need I guess, whereas  a focus upon the wave removes…well –ness. So I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of earth, take your pick. Focus on the ocean, with all that lovely flowing and melding and movement and so on, or go look at a wave and forget [as we do] where it came from and must be a part of. Or if you must, check out the Forrest while noticing the trees. Could be a good thing!

Paul

Tired?

I don’t know about you, but I often get tired. Yesterday I was talking about how so many people get tired and I started to wonder…is it really tiredness we are feeling?

Our supermarket shelves and advertising in every conceivable media is full of energy pills and health foods and super drinks. We take coffee, coke and other stimulants to help us keep alert and awake, but are we doing ourselves a disservice.

What if we are not tired at all, but simply obeying the laws of nature. When the ocean is at low tide, do we complain that the ocean isn’t doing so well and needs bucking up. We understand that tides go high and low and that’s alright.

Perhaps we could be mindful that our personal tides also go up and down. And that slow peaceful restfulness, is just a state of being and not a sign of disability.

Wanting to sit, lie, sleep, go into a reverie, be cool and the like are states of being, that’s  all. Interestingly, when we deny ourselves the pleasure of slowing down, it’s narcotic drowsy power increases. 

What if we explored our low tide states instead of manically stimulating  and energising ourselves at every turn. What if we reconsidered the category of tired altogether. A first it seems a negative state in line with empty petrol tanks. What if we took tiredness and called it something else like…times of pleasure, rest and recreation. A time where wise people come to enjoy the state of rest.

We could  even look at tiredness in terms of variation and notice that our feelings of tiredness are not constant. That during any number of hours, our quiet time energy levels vary a lot. Low energy to high energy, all over the place. And so if we can have fluctuating energy during being so called tired, what does that say about the term tired. Other than it’s not a fixed thing.

Then because of mindfulness, something new starts to happen. The placebo effect. When you have found that tired isn’t a fixed negative state, but a nice, comforting one instead full of fluctuating energy, your sense of nourishment in the “low tide’ is vastly increased. Refreshment is enhanced. Then you truly know that our personal low and high tides, our ebb and flows, our ups and downs, are just the oceans of human nature at work.

Paul

On the telly today

On the telly today, there was a video of a child being abused and after that, a discussion panel got into a lively rant about it. I became  uncontrollably emotional, flooded and sobbing in the hall, and wondering what the hell is going on. Why am I crying. Was I abused as a kid, cause even through the sobbing and pain, I had no sense of any abuse, no memory, not even the possibility of abuse. So what’s going on? I concluded finally, after racking my brains for an answer, that childhood the usual way we are brought up, might be the problem.

Children get their little selves torn apart, to fit the way parents want them to be. Parents are full of corrective’s. They will think of you in terms that are often simply untrue, but that horribly, you will take on board  because they are your parents after all, and  must be right. It takes us half a lifetime to find the many flaws in our parents, let alone their ways of bringing us up.

So that my dad for instance, was lovingly over protective, which made me think of myself as weak and fearful. Is that not abuse? Unintended to be sure, but no less abusive for that. When we are changed from who we are in any negative way, and by negative I mean anything that restricts, inhibits, and judges, it feels like abuse, and it hurts.

But no adult, and no parent would ever know that they were abused or abusing in this way.  If it’s the usual business of bringing up the kids, then I believe this kind of existential abuse goes unnoticed, but not unfelt. and that’s what jammed me up today.

The abuse a society instils in it’s people, is huge. Take competition for instance. It’s the single most fundamental key to understanding our western way of life.  However, the principles of love, heart felt kindness and compassion are not intrinsic to it.

 Competition  strangulates love’s free expression. It’s like having Asthma. Not being permitted to be you in full glorious extension, chokes the living breath out of you. Is that not abuse?

I think that the growing of children and the continued growth of adults, based on our currents ways of thinking are deeply flawed, and that we are all being continually hurt, abused if you will. Much can change though.

We could start again. We could learn to understand the principles and practices that allow us a willingness to express our loveliness, openness, compassion, and accountablity for our tribe. And we could investigate what values and beliefs we hold, that strangulate, isolate, and violate.  That could be a good start. Let the healing begin.

Paul

Make it happen, let it happen

Do you remember the Eastern idea of yin and Yang that we were all fascinated with in the 70’s? Well this idea of Make it happen, let it happen, comes out of that…sort of.

With the yin and yang thing, we are looking at the feminine and the masculine aspects in everything and many oracles use these 2 principles  to explain many usually unknowable events.

Make it happen, and let it happen are about the way we move through our lives. I’m mainly a let it happen man. By this I mean that I’m not particularly ambitious, and just allow myself to float along with much that is going on. But not everything. In my emotions, judgments of life and people around me, I have plenty of opinions and no one could say that in these aspects I am doing much letting it happen, at all.

So while it appears that descriptions of Making it happen, and  Letting it happen are very good at showing up the kind of energy you often use in every day life, it might be wrong to decide that you are strongly one way or the other at first glance. You have to think about it a bit.

There is even a meditation you can try. It’s a walking meditation where you decide if at the moment, you are pushing as you walk or just strolling along. You could try this on the stuff that is there in your thinking. I think it is quite hard to notice the way you make thoughts in your mind, as apposed to letting other thoughts come and go.

I found when I started doing this exercise years ago, that there seemed to be a rhythm in making it happen and letting it happen, that happened all by itself. And that all of life, if you were to pay attention to the moments, would do this dance for you.

Also and this is the point of it all, is this…we human beings are either making it happen or letting it happen, but out of balance. In fact sleeping might be a good example for us to think about, in that we mostly decide that we will go to sleep after TV, food, A good night out, whatever, rather than when we feel the urge to sleep.

We so often make things happen or let them happen around us according to some other human based activity. Tired? Well tough, you’ve got to go to work. Hugely active and engaged in your life, but have a slight feeling of wanting to put your feet up and disengage for a bit, but let it slide and then get stuck in…cause it’s important.

These urges and feelings of Make it happen, let it happen are often dismissed, or missed completely from sight, and they might lead in the extreme to “Things going wrong”, “Things entirely out of balance”, out of wack, huge disturbances and chaos of every kind.

We may even use  “Make it happen, let it happen” as an explanation for the environmental and economic crises that we are in the middle of. What if having plundering the world for a couple of hundred years [Make it happen], and not letting the Earth take a break [Let it happen] has let to the general weird scariness.

And now the balance is perhaps asserting itself again. Having too much of one aspect and not the other brings the other towards you, much like a stone just released from a sling shot. Remember those?

Health matters could be considered in this light…too much living one aspect. Today we do so much. We are so busy….Maybe? Only you can decide. If it’s too much or too little, you might come to know it by taking note of when a urge for the opposite has risen. It pays to pay attention. 

Paul

Short term memory loss…huh!

They tell us that as we get older, we lose memory. But that we retain long term memory. Perhaps that’s because what happened in the past was meaningful to us, and that now as we have aged and are living in a younger person’s world, much of that world is not so interesting to us, so we don’t care to remember that stuff. It’s a world less personally relevant.

Personally I couldn’t care less for today’s music, their musicians, the goings on of the younger actors in modern films. Much of today’s younger world is relevant to the young, who have to find a mate, make their way, find out the meaning of life. Their culture, music, media reflects this. But I’ve done that, and what interests me now isn’t that stuff. It’s old hat to me…I’ve done it. So of course It’s not meaningful to me.

Now imagine your visiting in a Nursing home. Don’t forget that it was planned by younger people for the management of older people. Do you really think that the life there is in any way relevant or meaningful to the people who live there?

Well, it’s not. The only people who have to remember things there, are the staff. It’s important that they do…it’s their job. The residents, however, don’t have to remember anything. Nothing meaningful for them goes on there anyway. Perhaps you’ll want to argue that older people’s lives always have value and life is meaningful. Well go ahead. But first spend 3 weeks in any organizational setting like a hospital and tell me that your brain doesn’t just freeze up and rust.

There has to be a better way and variation might be the key.[Variation is a powerful key in EJ Langer's Fabulous Book "Counter Clockwise].  In a Nursing home, the same things go on every day. The routines are like rock, they never change. That’s a fact. But facts may well be not so clear cut after all. If you look carefully, you might see slight variations. The cleaning gets done a bit ahead or behind schedule. Sometimes done better or worse. Sometimes there’s a joke, and sometimes things are oppressive. Little differences constantly occurring.

Looking for variation provides meaning, and meaning provides memory. It shows that despite evidence to the contrary, every category, belief, ideology, fact, and diagnosis may not be as it seems. A doctor’s view of your prognosis, or any expert opinion for that matter, may have a lot more variation in it than you might think. When told you have high blood pressure, is it always high, are there times when it’s not, is there lots of variation, so that the diagnosis is right some of the time, but not all the time? I have Diabetes, do my sugar levels vary? You bet they do.

A person with Dementia, has clear minded lucidity at times. And the more you look, the more you might find actually there. And so the idea of being demented first thought to be global and total, might actually turn out to be not. In fact a real help for people with Dementia is helping them with the task of noticing lucid moments, and to ask them to notice variation in any category, like when are other residents being lucid or not, during the day. Or when was the meal served. When was the food well presented and when  not.

IF staff were also being asked to notice the variation in any condition, diagnosis, illness and injury, they might find a lot more is going on. That can be meaningful and hence…memorable.

So it seems to me that since short term memory loss may be a function of meaninglessness and rigid categorization, and not just that they got old, it makes sense that to look for variation, holds the possibility of keeping memory strong and people alive.

Paul