Exercises - Good Mood Raising - What Can I Do?

I can turn my attention outwardly.  When we turn our attention outwardly, we can begin to put forth a bit of effort to make all those other people out there feel a wee bit better.  If everybody in this room is feeling real good, it’s pretty nice, is that right?  I’d have a hard time saying “aaaahhh” if everybody in here is feeling good, because a good mood is highly contagious, just like feeling “grumpy” is.

Now if you are in a room full of “grumpy” people, you’ll find that it’s a little difficult to raise the mood level, but at that moment I can decide that I have the conscious ability to raise the mood--none of the rest of the people are being conscious if they’re going to keep their mood down.

So consciously I can raise the mood for the whole room.  But even unconsciously—if you begin to raise the mood--a whole roomful can raise those other few people.  So if the world is not like you want it today; and I do read lots of things that I think most people have decided that the world is going to Hades in a hand basket; thereby picturing an illusion that they are worse off.

So let’s raise the mood to see how far I can reach out.  Now I know a few people.  You know a few people.  Everybody else knows a few people; and if every one of us was in the mood raising business today—and that’s a pretty good business to be in –I wonder how far out it could go and what effect it would have?  It doesn’t sound like much; but if you were just raising the mood a notch of everybody you came in contact with today, enough of it is going to run over--then they, possibly, will raise the mood a little bit of the next person they meet.  Can you see that it wouldn’t take too long for it to cover the whole world?  Where does it start—with two or three people raising the mood?

Now you can do it whether you’re running a business, or whether you work for someone else or even if you are staying home by yourself.  Wherever you are, it’s nicer if the mood is up—even if you’re at home by yourself—have you ever tried that?  It’s interesting and a worthwhile experiment of value.

If you’re driving in your car by yourself down the street, isn’t it nicer to have your mood up, rather than wondering where that “plough jockey” came from.  That guy must have got his license in a crap game, blap, blap, blap.  What are they all doing out here in the road.  Don’t they know this is my road, and here they are on it?

You can scream and holler all you want to, but you can also  sit there and have a good time watching everybody make things important.  That is kind of interesting, and you can think of it as entertainment.  They all have clown suits on.

I have found that one of the favorite indoor sports of people is to make about everything important—no mater what it is.

Now I think it’s a great big lot of fun to sit around and watch people make things that are totally irrelevant important. 

A man called me from LA the other day and said, “I finally caught on to something, and I’m saving a lot of money.”  “I used to go to the movies all the time to see a show.”  “Now I just go stop on any corner, and there’s a far better one going on—much better show going on and it has no admission fee.”

So I don’t know if that’s good for the movie industry, but it was good for him.  So here he was just having a ball because you can sit anywhere and watch the goings on. 

If you do look at a movie, you see that what makes it a story is that practically all the people in it are making every insignificant thing important, and they have one person called the “hero” or the “heroine” that comes along and kind of sees through the whole show and gets it around to not being important.  That’s the great Savior of the crowd—the hero or the heroine of the show. 

So, you can see that on any corner—only usually there’s nobody there to quit making it important.  Just more and more people make more and more things important, and it is funny!  That alone can get your mood up if you’re objective about it.