A small pilot light of Kindness...

Far more than we are inclined to accept and sometimes even realize, we are creatures of mood: our sense of our value as human beings is prone to extraordinary fluctuation.

At times, we know how to tolerate ourselves, the future seems benevolent, we can bear who we are in the eyes of others and we can forgive ourselves for the desperate errors of the past.

And then, at other points, the mood dips and we lament most of what we’ve ever done, we see ourselves as natural targets for contempt, we feel undeserving, guilty, weak, and headed for retribution and disaster.

Not only do difficult moods insist that they are correct, but they also seek to convince us that they are permanent. But our sense of self is naturally vicious; we are condemned to rise and fall, flow and ebb.

It can be very hard to grasp what causes our moods to shift.

A day that started with energy and hope can, by lunchtime, end up mired in self-hatred and tearfulness. A sure sense that we’ve finally turned the corner and are on the way to better things can be replaced at speed by an alternative certainty that we are a cosmic error.

We cannot, apparently, ever prevent our moods from being subject to change, but what is open to us all is to learn how to manage the change more effectively – so that our downturns can be ever so slightly more gentle, our sadness more containable and our inconstancy less shameful in our own eyes.

While we are being rocked by a dark mood, we should strive to keep a little light on, the light of sanity and self-kindness that can tell us, even though the hurricane is insisting otherwise, that we are not appalling, that we have done nothing unforgivable and that we have a right to be.

We can strive to keep ourselves plugged into a small pilot light of kindness until a larger sun is ready to rise once more.