There’s always a mood present in our experience. It’s amazing to think how the presence of a mood so completely shapes and conditions both our attitude and the way we see things. It’s important to have straight vision—some sense of what our life is about, what it’s for, and what it is we aspire to. This vision or aspiration provides a compass when moods arise that tear us apart and sometimes throw us into turmoil, irritability, anger, depression, or frustration. Various moods and emotions, often conditioned by relatively minor events, can arise and push us in a direction that’s quite different than the major direction of our vision, our life, what we actually trust and what makes sense to us.
One of the lay residents here at Abhayagiri once talked about an interesting juxtaposition. One day, while feeling irritable, he came down from the mountain and went into the kitchen. There was a guest there who didn’t seem to be pulling his weight, which affected this resident’s mood. Later on that day, he got word that this guest was struggling to digest the news that his brother had been shot and killed. Juxtaposing reality and perception—the guest’s shock and the resident’s irritation, for instance—can put things into perspective and reveal how petty we can be.
It’s human to get irritated when things aren’t going as smoothly as we’d like or when we’re feeling misunderstood. But we need to recognize that indulging in such moods puts our present and future well-being at risk. We have this life and it’s not a game. If we let our moods take control and spur us to act on impulse, then we wind up doing things that can damage our long-term interests and the well-being of others.
So when these unwelcome moods arise, it’s important to do everything we can to gain perspective on them and remember that they come and go. We shouldn’t blindly delight in good moods either. It’s okay to enjoy a good mood, but if we get lost in it then we’ll get lost when a bad mood comes around as well. There’s no way around that. We can’t realistically say, I’ll take the good moods and forget the bad moods. We train ourselves in meditation with any mood that comes up. We take stock of it and remember that the mood is not who we are. When a mood arises, we do our best to recognize its existence and then investigate how it may be pushing us to act in ways that aren’t helpful to our welfare or the welfare of others.