As a person whose mood changes every now and then, there was a video I had watched on the internet which kept bugging me. I have never taken these quick mood swings negatively. It is a part of me that lets me move on, it lets me know that I am not stuck here; it is not the worst or the best.

However, there had been a question that kept lingering in my head. That question went like this ‘Why aren’t happy and sad moods in equal ratio’. The question didn’t mean it had to be the same but something close to it at least. I have so much to be grateful for, so why still do the ‘sad emotions’ rule over the happy ones? I would question myself.

That one video showed me, it answered so many of my questions. We have built up a habit or maybe it can be called a trend. What do we do when we are feeling low? Even a little kid would have an easy answer to that question. What we do is we listen to music (sad ones), we cut off people, maybe some depend on alcohol, and few cries. Why do we do that? That’s because since the moment we were born, that’s what we have seen others do.

Doesn’t it mean that we have been blindly following? Have we been caught up in the loop of continuing the ordinary?

I competed. It was something new and awesome to me. We were to go through five rounds and the top few with the highest points would proceed further. After continuous losses in four rounds, I couldn’t bear the thought of going through the fifth loss. I was at the bottom of the chart. I was mentally drained. I wanted to hide away from everyone and cry. Usually, that’s what I would have done. It’s not that I didn’t try the usual, of course I did. The difference is, parallel to that I decided to grow. On one hand, I had nothing to lose from another one of those losses, on the other I could learn a lot from the better ones.

It’s not one of those stories where at the end I magically proceed on further. I didn’t. However, I wasn’t at the bottom of the chart anymore. In the fifth round, from being fourth(last) in the room I climbed up to being the second. It might not seem like a lot but if it wasn’t for the last round, the confidence to participate in such competitions wouldn’t have returned to me.

The point here is that I decided not to drown in despair. I turned my emotions up and down to make the best out of it. I decided to choose another way to deal with emotion i.e. by learning.

I might be wrong on this but what I feel is that there are better ways to deal with emotions. Those cutting people off and listening to sad music just help to accelerate the growth of that emotion.

We prefer to grow that very emotion because we have found comfort in it. That very feeling, is more familiar to us and no one likes to jump toward the unknown, right?  Rather why haven’t most of us tried taking a deep breath and feeling the air around us or searching for alternatives to make the best of it? For me, such ways have worked out pretty well.  I am not suggesting that everyone should do exactly what I do but maybe consider getting out of that habit for once?

Maybe experiment a bit?

By: Elija Panta (Science, K1)