Like the moon’s pull on the water of the creatures roaming this earth, our moods sway us by the gravity of their force. It is by the momentum of positive moods which stir us into action, with thoughts and feelings basking in ideas which compel us to build and create. It is not us who deserves credit, for it is more often the mood and its respective clout that is responsible. Should depressive emotions enter us, damage and deterioration can come and dissolve whatever great and grande dreams we may have been developing before. It is from the recognition of how pliable we are, against the backdrop of forces other than our own personal volition, that we come to some sobriety in relation to our situation.

Man is endowed with the capacity to think in varying ways and modes. We are not usually conscious of the difference, for example, of the thoughts which roll in and out of our heads like an assortment of visitors who enter someone’s home. These are the associative, random and automatic thoughts which come to be through the most mechanical of means. They differ quite greatly from the rare thoughts which we, ourselves, work to create and formulate by way of intentional effort. It is by increasing the, for lack of a better term, market share of the thoughts we intentionally create, thereby displacing the automatic kind, that we begin to benefit and profit from its quality to protect us from the influence of passing moods.

The reality has always been that man is born as a hapless creature and begins his more conscious years already having been indoctrinated with the talking and thinking faculty. His instincts were alive from the very moment he shot out from his mother’s womb and breathed his first whiff of air, and his emotions had their official debut quite soon after. Yet his mentality and the concepts that he has filed and tucked away through observation, imitation and education, had its start already a few years into his life on this earth. At the moment in which self-recognition and full-fledged memory made their appearance, he was already a creature with many programmed assumptions declared with steel about who he is, what he is, what he knows, and what he can do.

Many things have to thus be unlearned, for there is no point of adding knowledge to a structure built on faulty foundations. Man as he is has to recognize his situation for what it is and realize, in particular, the influence which passing emotional moods have on his present circumstances. For should everything remain the same within him, then his future will simply be a predictable consequence of the patterns of the past and present. Moods are a force far too formidable to be controlled in and of themselves, yet through intentional effort to be aware and think in a steady and sober way, a man can at least provide himself with some relief when the storms of both positivity and negativity sow their influence.

We are very simple things, and yet we complicate ourselves through fabrication and fanciful imagination. This is part of the leftovers which associative, automatic, thinking bring to bear. The more space a man fills of the hours of the day, in which he is relatively awake and conscious with intentional thoughts and awareness of what is entering and leaving him, the greater control he has on not being knocked off course. When we learn to separate ourselves from our associative thoughts and habitual moods, there comes a type of freedom, however slight, which keeps us singular and strong. For a mood cannot be believed or a thought accepted simply by the fact that it comes to be in you! If a man entered your home, and he were a stranger, would you simply accept him in or would you take a little caution and check his credentials first?