I’m in the low period that follows a period of elevated mood.  If you’re a reader here, you witnessed the elevation in the form of my website revamp and the glut of posts that came immediately afterwards.  Now I’m experiencing the necessary energetic lull that always comes after such a time of elevation.

This happens whenever I have an upward surge in mood, whether it’s fully manic or not.  I have a few days of good mood, and then it goes away, to be replaced by an unpleasant malaise made all the worse by its comparison to the previous heights.  This most recent upswing in mood was only technically “hypomanic” in psychiatric parlance, but still, if I could bottle hypomania and give it away, I would, because it’s wonderful.  It still results in a minor “crash” afterwards, though.

Whenever I have a good mood, it’s a bit like being Charlie Brown being taunted by Lucy with the football.  She’s yanked the football away from him every single time, but every single time she taunts him, he goes for it thinking this time will be different.  But she does it again and again, and he falls for it again and again.  My good moods are like this.  Each time it happens, I think, “am I getting better? will this be the time it sticks?” and I forge ahead in the hopes a fall won’t come as it has in the past.  And I am disappointed every time, just like Charlie Brown.

I don’t want to avoid or prevent my good moods in an effort to avoid disappointment, but I wish I could cultivate a mindset that would allow me to enjoy the good mood while it lasts, knowing that it won’t.  That’s the Buddhist trick of “living in the moment”, and it’s probably the hardest thing that faith asks of its adherents.  How does a person learn to live without comparing the present moment to the experienced past or the imagined future?  To simply let things be as they are without clinging to them?  To not be disappointed when good feelings inevitably pass?

This is antithetical to the Western mode of thought.  I am fighting over 50 years of programming that tells me to make selfish happiness at all times my life goal to the exclusion of all else and to avoid anything uncomfortable.  This is a setup for failure, this is not how life works.  It’s little wonder that our culture is so deeply unhappy and unfulfilled.

As I said in my essay “Sukkha and Dukkha”, dukkha, or dissatisfaction, is caused by grasping and clinging, and that is precisely my problem with the mental carousel that is my brain.  When my carousel horse is up, I’m giddy and want it to stay there because I feel so good and am getting so much done.  When my carousel horse is down, I’m angry and sad to be in that place again and want to get out of it as soon as possible.  I wouldn’t be so angry and sad to find my horse down again if I hadn’t expected it to stay up in the first place, and I would be better able to remind myself that the horse doesn’t stay down forever.

By the same token, I have to have a measure of compassion for myself.  After all, what normal human being wouldn’t find themselves in a state of happiness and want to stay there, and also be disappointed when it was over?  Yet as I contemplate operating “in the moment” in the absence of grasping and clinging, I find a part of myself yawning with emptiness, and not the good kind that Buddhism expounds upon.  Something goes in the place of grasping and clinging, and I don’t know what it is yet.  Until I do, there will simply be a frightening void there that I instinctively avoid.

While this is a frustrating place to be in, it’s also a good place.  It’s often these frustrating places that demarcate a milestone of psychospiritual evolution for me; a place of growth and expansion, of leveling up.  I am often faced at these times with a major conundrum of some sort, one that is made up of smaller lessons that came before it, and now I have to put my accumulated knowledge to work to tackle this larger problem.  They’re always difficult, like final exams, but if I solve the problem, I gain even further knowledge that allows me to advance.

I can do this.  I’ve done it many times before, enough to be practiced at it.  I just need rest, patience, and tenacity.  I feel as though I am on the edge of a breakthrough, one that will clear up some personal confusion I have been carrying and that will come with some measure of healing.  The issues that have been knocking around in my head and heart as of late are very old and deep, and the sooner they are resolved, the better.

In the meantime, I will do my best to cultivate a sense of impermanent nowness and remind myself that nothing lasts forever, whether good or bad, and that it is only by the presence of the contrast of darkness that light is desirable and beautiful.  The giddiness wears off by a necessary fact of the Universe.  If I felt that way all the time, it would no longer be special.

And truth be told, if I can avoid feeling suicidal, there is even beauty in the darkness, a strange kind of comfortable warmth and numbness that allows one to retreat for a time, a la “hello darkness, my old friend”.  I am currently studying Taoism, which gives us the symbol of the yin-yang: black and white forever in balance and part of one another.  I strive for this balance in the push-pull of my mental states, knowing it is only accomplished by flowing easily from one to the other, without resistance or judgment.