I feel great. Why is that?

Five hours back, I felt bereft, mopey – not suicidal, never that, I’m too curious about life to omit a moment – but in the dumps, desolate, lost. Why was I here? Why bother? What’s the meaning of anything? I ground my grimness into palatable prose, I hope, but the raw materials for my missive reeked with rot.

At present I’m almost hilarious with hallelujah. Having slept deeply for three hours (the nap I call my lagniappe), woken by Henry’s considerate whimper fully sixty minutes past his norm (dogs’ bodies tell time more nearly than clocks), I sprung from bed (exaggeration: “creaked faster than usual” would be more accurate), hurried Henry to his evacuation corner where he complied quickly, emptied self and dishwasher lickety-split while coffee boiled, and flipped open laptop, skipping even email, to gambol on the snowfield of an empty screen. Words yipped from my fingertips like hounds at kennel’s gate. My consciousness had utterly altered in a few hours – had the world? Not that I knew. Civilization’s enemies had not been scotched in the night (o, happy fantasy!), no fresh cause for hope, yet wow, what a treat to be alive, here, now, with you!

Dialecticians debate whether facts form ideas or vice versa. Is Hamlet right – “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” – or is every effect relatable to its measurable cause? Do we with Godlike authority create our world or are we rats in a maze? This debate, while at least as diverting as Wordle, ignores experience. My moods, actions, opinions are tossed as capriciously as a kite by an invisible breeze, first one way, then another, and to insist otherwise, to “stay true,” is to incarcerate candor in the clink of consistency. We struggle to seem the same – to others and ourselves – so we can deduce suitable next steps and leash our language, while our minds whip wildly amidst possibilities, teetering on the bongo-board twixt hope and despair. Nothing is certain – that’s the truth of it – so it’s up to us whether to whoop or weep.

Last night I wept (metaphorically), this morning whoop. “Will the real Carll please stand up?”

One might trace my transformation, I suppose, to REMs, gastric juices, dream-sorties, if one possessed the data. A “good night’s sleep” does any body “a world of good.” One might ascribe new convictions to divine intervention as the ancients used to: astromancy, cartomancy, cleromancy, necromancy and the like all depend on the participation of the Big Guy upstairs. My ideology is neither materialistic nor superstitious. The reason I’m existentially unstable is… I haven’t the foggiest. And to impose an explanation on the inexplicable is to distort the evidence for our emotional convenience. We believe what we say we believe so we can quit thinking. Theology is a refuge from truth.

Psychiatry for more than a century has attempted to wrangle mood variations into creditable science. While blessing their heroism and benefiting from their therapeutics, I’m unconvinced of their thesis. Sorrow is not sickness, neither is affirmation sanity. Exuberance and despair are equally defensible responses to the adventure of being. Life is sad – and glad – not either/ or but both – simultaneously. Our opportunity is to experience this immensity, while not being crushed by its force.

Was my gloom mistaken last night? No, it had every reason. Is my delight delusive this dawn? Neither that. In light of this uncertainty, is humility mandatory? You bet. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility,” wrote T.S. Eliot. “Humility is endless.”

Amen.