Moods play King Of The Mountain. One mood rises to the top of the mind, and fancies itself undislodgable– supreme.

The happy mind can see itself not as a phase, but as the final stage of evolution. “I acknowledge the intractable woes of the world, but from this perspective, I have discovered a way of being happy I think I shall always have.”

The unhappy mind can feel so keenly the unhappiness and misery all around it that it wonders, “Knowing about the wars and refugees, hurricanes and disease, the homeless, the addicts, the unemployed, all the unhappy, the filthy rich, could I ever again be happy?”

The emotional life and intellectual life overlap and form alliances, so that what one feels emotionally is justified intellectually. One can articulate a mood by calling to mind things that make one happy or unhappy. These readymade justifications reinforce the preeminent emotional state and make it that much more firmly entrenched.

But the unified mind is smarter than the sum of its parts. If one is happy, all the unhappiness in the world will not cancel that. The happy person remains aware of the unhappiness in the world and his own misfortunes that have often cast him into a morass of sympathetic unhappiness. Maybe it won’t always suffice, but for the moment, it’s okay.

The unhappy person remains aware of the happiness in the world and his own good luck that give him ample reason not to despair over the opaque fog of unhappiness wherein he is trapped. But he doesn’t care about those things right now. He will someday, just not today. When? Can’t say.

The brain is fickle, nimble, and impressionable.

It might be that one wakes up in a bad mood because he had bad dreams he doesn’t remember. Or good moods put one into a good mood.

A bad mood is no more a bad thing than a cloudy day is a bad thing or good thing or a clear day is a good thing or a bad thing. A blue sky is a dull thing, as is an undifferentiated ceiling of cloud. Some clouds, some sky, some good luck, some bad luck, a bad mood, a good mood: without these basics, we have a less than well-rounded picture.

Different moods are different ways to appreciate all the factors in life that demand responses, reactions, our personal attention, be they an upset stomach, or the threats implied by the Milky Way’s Black Hole.