Last night, minutes after I fell asleep, the security alarm blared me awake. I shot out of bed, intensely alert and quickly running through the next best course of action. Normally, my husband would be the one to go downstairs and do recon. He’s a 6’4 blackbelt Army veteran, matching me in fearlessness but better equipped physically to confront predators. Right now, though, he’s a 6’4 blackbelt with a broken leg and still recovering from the surgeries that added a lot of metal to his frame. So I went down first and was hit with freezing air at the bottom of the stairs.
The front door was open. I know I checked the locks before going up to bed, I check the locks every night at least two or ten times, both doors, and maybe a few more times after that. Mama bear has two precious babies to protect. Did someone pick the locks? Did someone have a key? Oh my god, we never changed the locks after buying the house. How could I have let that slip?
We checked the house to ensure it was predator-free. My husband tried to reassure me that we were safe, the kids are safe, the house is safe. With each word, my anger combusted. Now, I was not only running through every possible horrible scenario I could think of, I started to go down the list of everything my husband had ever done wrong and all the ways he continued to trespass against the sanctity of our secular marriage.
I said some horrible things, and in response to his silence, I said much more. I was in an intensely closed mood.
Moods are usually evaluated somewhere on the spectrum between positive and negative. You can be in bad mood, a good mood, a meh mood. This judgement or valuation can cause all sorts of problems – panic, discomfort, anxiety, fear – especially since we can’t ultimately control our mood states.
If we let go of the judgment, we might instead begin to experience our moods like an aperture. In some mood states, we feel open and expansive. In others, we feel closed.
Last night, after the alarm screeched me from sleep, I was in a very closed mood. This afternoon, during lunch with my husband, my mood was open and I didn’t blame him for anything. Just the awareness of feeling closed can be enough to open the aperture and experience a different mood state. Always, the aperture opens and closes and always opens again.