Today morning, for some inexplicable reason, I am in a mood for poetry.
That vague abstraction wherein all moods tumble in the way leaves newly fallen glide along a pathway toward a lazy destination, and while it may be a tumultous sensation for some, for me, it is of having two feet not entirely touching the ground, of lost and stray thoughts coming and going, and a sense of the past interlocking with a lingering sensation of a forgotten future.
Tone has always been important to me. How someone says something to me is almost as effective as what they say. Sometimes, more so, depending on the person and context. Sensitivity being one of my stubborn characteristics (Achilles heel), I am quite susceptible to inflections in tone and vibrations carried across.
So goes it with tones in written content. I have read and appreciated the sensation of a writer's ability to create and cultivate a landscape of mood by tone while variously being criticized by others for lack of credibility in technical aspects such as plot, characters and/or intellectual proficiency of the writer him/herself.
I have a guilty pleasure of reading both chic-lit and YA (young adult) fiction simply because of this very reason: the whole feel that is generated out of reading these genres resound pretty well with me. Perhaps there is nothing profound about the actual story, or perhaps the concepts involved are those belonging to a younger generation or age, but somehow they still appeal to me simply because of the way the writer has written.
Likewise, I have browsed around on blogs, and observe how some bloggers (writers) produce a quantity of writing that is lauded by many readers, but after reading much of these pieces, I've felt something lacking in quality. In some instances, somehow sincerity starts to wither away in the writing produced, perhaps by repetition of similar themes, or rather I may get fed up of the same mushy-love-gratitude-sentimentality that keeps getting repackaged up in different wrappings and ribbons but, when you really consider it, remains the same. And the frequency of it happening also perhaps is influencing my perception because somehow it somehow negates sincerity. I also get literary turned off by pieces sounding like they had been written as school assignments; the expression of genuine thoughts and emotions becoming sadly wooden by trying to conform to a solid structure of formality. Or perhaps, this paragraph can be simply considered a rant, and we shall move on.
Mood. Isn't this such an amazing thing? On one hand we take it for granted in our everyday lives, because, well obviously it is part of our everyday lives, what gets us going each day, and more specifically what demarcates each day as different from the next. But then again, less intensely speaking, we often encounter this specimen of being 'not in the mood' or having 'mood swings'. Yet, imagine how absolutely mundane life itself would be if we were living just one baseline of a mood the entire time. Oh, certainly, that is what - in zen realms - we ought to aim for: walking the middle path, balancing all forces, that precise edge of contentment. But we were given (if you accept that something or some external force has the power to be a Giver) this glorious spectrum of colour; are we expected to learn to moderate so much that we relegate all these colours into one tone of mud brown or gray, or pristine black and white?
But we have it, and this is why one day we can say 'Mmm, why yes, today I feel like [having] a chocolate chip cookie, thank you!' and then tomorrow we decide, 'Ugh, no, are you insane? Chocolate? Ew, please.' Sure, it can be annoying, but - aha - it is annoying because it seemingly reflects a sense of fickleness, which for the most part certainly shouldn't be a good thing, but takes us to the idea of unpredictability. Which is, essentially, life.
The unpredictability of life is what injects that very colour (oh God please, Blogger, stop marking my non-American spelling as incorrect! SLAP) into it, and our capacity to experience an equally unpredictable spectrum of moods allows for a greater probability of possibilities.
And for now I shall allow you to assimilate this in all the glory of your multitude of moods, and will take up from where I have left off (hoping that I remember exactly where I was going with this) in my next post.
