So a couple of things: I’ve been thinking a lot about mood, and the role of moods in our every day life. What is a “mood”? I think that the word mood represents a general feeling or sentiment that changes based on a range of stimuli. A mood could be based on a social setting, like a wild nightclub, a business meeting, dinner with the family, or being one of only two people in a movie theater. In each case, the social context, along with the physical context right down to what you are wearing and how much sleep you got last night, flow together into something you experience in the form of a “mood.” Certainly substances can also have an effect on mood; from coffee to cocaine, your mood is altered. Perhaps mood isn’t the best word for it. ‘Feeling’ is not quite the right word either, as it tends to be understood a little too broadly. Really it should be something like situational sentimentalism. Situational should be understood to mean any psycho-social context, keeping in mind that all experience is born of a social interaction of some sort. Sentimentalism refers to internal impulses that help us organize our immediate world. I think we probably each have an internal world that we are constantly changing to reflect the outside world as new information is translated through social interaction, filtered through our situational sentimentalism, and is deemed useful or un-useful. The important thing to remember is that moods, or sentiments exist based on so many unique “variables” (not quite the right word), that every experience, whether psychological or social, can never be exactly replicated for an individual, let a lone a group such as a sample, or population. The first “bottom line,” as it were, is that situational sentiments account for nearly all of the shaping of this internal world. That means that I am really a product of my mood at any given time, which is unique from any other given time. I think that it is likely that we are each constructing many many little worlds as we each go about our days, and the thing that governs our actions seems to be what we recall of the internal world we constructed from the last time we were in a similar mood. This infers that we never really throw out old ideas; these internal mechanism, or mini-worlds, that guide our actions simply become useful or un-useful. This means that, not only is truth and reality a product of individual internal translations, but that it is completely based on situationaly derived sentiments and the sense we make of the world as viewed through that singular (yet infinitely multi-ocular) lens. And to make it more complicated, situational sentiments are in constant flux; you start to feel hungry during your child’s soccer game, you become angry when someone cuts you off in traffic, you receive tragic news during an up-beat card game. This is beginning to refer to the idea of sentimental gravity, or mood priority. Its interesting that, at least my culture, seems to put a high value on consistency. This refers to normative behavior, like showing up on time places, or wearing appropriate attire, or completing tasks by an agreed upon time. This means that people shape their lives around creating the same situational sentiments every day through a consistent routine. Wake up at the same time, drink the same thing, work the same hours, and basically maintain more predictable moods that produce more predictable output. Well who says that’s the best way? Maybe the best solutions to problems are hidden within the sentiments that we try to avoid as a matter of adherence to norms. Maybe the dress code, the stringent schedule, the value placed on predictability and sameness are keeping new ways of thinking locked out. What would happen to people if they realized, as I think I do, that I can think contradicting thoughts based on different moods, and the world still turns. Paradoxical thinking, it seems to me, is a real tool rather than a problem to systematically solve. Eventually something will need to be said about the relationship between thinking and sentimentality. But I mean, watching a movie changes your mood, hearing a song changes your mood, the clothes you wear changes your mood—moods govern our actions more than any rational. And this empirical stuff is simply getting at the wrong information; its too complex, contextual, and unique from one individual to another.

By the way, I think it would be interesting to start a journal called something like The Multidisciplinary Journal of Thought and have a wide range of experts write a short narrative about how they think. Eventually it would be a journal respected for its creativity and transferability of unique processes that people would love to read it, and love to write for it. It would have to be written in first person, be between 2 and 20 pages or so, and you cannot cite others, it is simply a narrative about how you think and problem solve, not a compilation of people who influenced you. From business to social work, from medicine to politics, just answer the question “how do you think?” It would be a great experiment in multidisciplinary exchange of processes, with less focus on the ideas, although examples would be allowed. It would have to be written using language that other disciplines could understand and find useful, but otherwise, it should be very interpretive.