When thought plays tricks...

It happens you know!

One minute you're up in the clouds brimming with joy and tumultuous happiness and the next you're wondering if the world has given you up for a dry crust of bread and a bag of lonliness.

The brain plays tricks on our soul. What we think will last forever is as transient as mist. What we hope for often doesn't come to pass. What we live for can be as empty as old tin cans.

Perhaps!

It's the moment isn't it? The instantaneous second of our being that is truth and reality explored? Yeah! Maybe! But the brain plays tricks on our beliefs.

Emotion is not in the heart - it's in the head. Emotion makes us think and act certain ways, makes us believe certain things, makes us do things and want things different from yesterday. Thing is...Emotion distorts what is and makes it bigger, smaller, less, more, wider, more impossible, less possible, and insanely NOT what we want or makes us insanely believe there is more to what is!

Emotion is a hall of mirrors and Thought walks through it every day.

We are all Emotion all the time. Rationality is an emotion too, along with happiness, lonliness, mirth and contentment. We aspire to the emotions we assume are "good" and berate and fear for ourselves when we are in the throws of those emotions we have labeled as "bad". We're supposed to believe that emotions are neither good nor bad - they just "Are". Perhaps!

Feeling sucky...sucks! It IS bad! It isn't nice to feel lousy, undervalued, unappreciated, moody, hurt, sad, depressed, sullen, angry, or morose at all. It's no wonder we don't want these emotions to visit us! They SUCK! They really do!

Feeling wonderfully alive and happy is what we want. We kick ourselves for not feeling like this every moment - its human nature to do so. And so, we try hard to rationalise it too and reconstruct our thinking to be "positive" about feeling like shit!

It's what we think that makes us what we are! We can choose to think in positive ways but that takes training and a big dose of confidence too which is damned hard to find when Emotion is riding the raging bull of "F*** Off And Leave Me Alone!". One kind of has to concentrate to just stay in the saddle when Emotion wants to play that game so any thoughts of being positive or choosing another path toward "happiness" becomes kinda moot really.

The thing to remember, at least for me, is that what Emotion tells me and what I think about as a result ... may not be what actually is!

Same goes for the times when Emotion is way out there in La-La Happy Land! Somewhere there is a middle ground but Emotion has this habit of standing just either side of it.

So if I am being led to believe things that aren't necessarily true because I'm in that lousy state of "F.O.A.L.M.A.", or "Yay me! I'm so happy!", gently tell me I'm being an idiot and let me wallow in that mire only for as long as absolutely necessary to buck Emotion off the bull...shit!