I don’t know about you, but I struggle to maintain an “enlightened” state of mind. I tend to be more anxious and angry than I am at peace. My most constant companion is my mood, which can range from happy to sad to fearful to angry to depressed. This is what most new homeowners encounter when they go through the process of buying a new home.
The truth is that there are a lot of things you can do to improve your mood. Many of these things are physical, like sleeping. But even more can be mental, like reading a book or journaling.
When I first moved to my current apartment that I share with a great friend, I just wrote down random thoughts that came to mind, then deleted them and tried to write them down. This is what I ended up doing. But it didn’t help, because I realized that writing things down and then deleting them was like going through the motions. I started to feel like a robot. This is not an ideal place to be, to be honest.
The best way to recover from this is to try to write down and delete all the thoughts that have been making you feel bad, all the negative feelings, all the angry thoughts. This is the first step to learning that you are not a robot. It may feel like you are, but that is not how you feel. You are a human being who is not a robot. You feel something. You feel emotions. You feel anything. Feelings can be painful.
We are a very social species. We tend to group ourselves into communities, tribes, or nations. When it comes to our feelings, we may group ourselves into tribes of friends or enemies. We can even have a feeling of being friends with a person we are not particularly close to. But it’s important to remember that our feelings for one another are not like a friendship. A friendship exists only if we are willing to risk our feelings for the sake of the friendship.
Our feelings are actually somewhat different. We want to feel loved, accepted, and cared about. We may also feel scared, angry, and sad. But those feelings are the result of our own actions and are not something we want to feel.
The problem is that when we are close to someone we care about, we feel so much more positive emotions. For example, I have a very close friend named Jason. When we are in a car together, I always feel happy and carefree. And I am always so happy when I see Jason. When I see him, I feel happy and relieved. But when I don’t see him, I feel sad, afraid, and lonely.
This same feeling is also the source of our feelings. For example, I am always so happy when I see my mom. I never see my dad because I am always sad when I see him. Whenever I see my mom, I feel happy, and I am often glad that she is alive. But whenever I see my dad, I feel sad, and I am very sad when I see him.
It may be the case that Jason is not a person you feel happy with. Or at least that is what Jason may be trying to tell you. He is the very person you see when you need help; but if you don’t see him, you don’t know that you are going to be helped. If you see Jason, you see someone helping someone who has lost a loved one.
But Jason doesn’t always feel like a person you see when you need help. He only seems to show himself to you when you are in need but if you are not seeing him, you do not know that he is going to show up. So you may be feeling sad when you see a guy who has been injured or has lost a loved one, but this doesn’t mean that you are sad only when you see a person who has no one. Feelings can be more complicated than this.
