Let it go...................

 

There is too much tendency to look inward at one's own moods, and to try to evaluate them.  To stand on the outside and try to look inside is futile; whatever was there will go away.  This also applies to a nebulous thing described as "Happiness."  To try to identify it is like turning on a light to look at the darkness.  Analyze it, and it is gone.

-Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living

Wisdom.......................

 21. Practise observing your moods, rather than being them.

-from this list from Nicholas Bate

Rx: Banjo music..............................

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On mood swings and sane talk..............

Let me submit, as my parting word, a warning to the skeptic:  the democratic process is in peril of self-negation.  The public's mood swings are driven by failures of government, not hope for change.  Each failure bleeds legitimacy from the system, erodes faith in the machinery of democracy, and paves the way for the opposite extreme. 

. . . A rebellious public, sectarian in temper and utopian in expectations, collides everywhere with institutions that rule by default and blunder, it seems, by habit.  Industrial hierarchies fer no longer able to govern successfully in a world swept to the horizon by a tsunami of information.  An egalitarian public is unwilling to assume responsibility under any terms.  The muddled half-steps and compromises necessary to democracy may become untenable under the pressure applied by these irreconcilable forces.

. . . I wrote this book, in part, to invite the discussion.  I did so in the manner of a man who notices a fire blazing in a corner of a locked room:  I don't want to start a panic, only some sane talk among the occupants about how best to put the thing out.

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt of the Public

But tell us how you really feel............

Deep down inside, I nurse a hot ember of anger, which requires the slightest of breezes to send me into paroxysm of furiously loud clacking on this old-style mechanical text entry device. “The keyboard of fury,” the missus calls it, and it is audible for miles around.


-Barry Ritholtz,  borrowed from here

On unhappiness.......................

"The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance."

-William James, as taken from here

Mood Rings.................

Here is more than you want to know:

A mood ring is a ring that contains a thermochromic element, such as liquid crystal, that changes colors based upon the temperature of the finger of the wearer. Most new rings come with a color chart indicating the supposed mood of the wearer based upon the colors indicated on the ring.

The mood ring was created in 1975 by two New York inventors, Josh Reynolds and Maris Ambats, who bonded liquid crystals with quartz stones set into rings.^[1] They initially retailed for $45 for a "silvery setting" and $250 for gold, and first sold at Bonwit Teller,^[2] rapidly becoming a fad in the 1970s.^[3]

photo via

Help someone.....................

     Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable way up.  Hence my snide comment about Sartre's "Hell is other people."  My friend Stephen Post, professor of Medical Humanities at Stony Brook, tells a story about his mother.  When he was a young boy, and his mother saw that he was in a bad mood, she would say, "Stephen, you are looking piqued.  Why don't you go out and help someone?"  Empirically, Ma Post's maxim has been put to rigorous test, and we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.

-Martin E. P. Seligman,  Flourish:  A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

On moods and fortune.............

"This is an age in which the mood decides the fortunes of the people rather than the fortunes decide the mood."

-attributed to Sir Winston Churchill

A good reason.......................................

..................................................................not to play Chopin.