Where a good mood comes from

Some mornings you wake already well. Not glad about anything — you check, the way you'd pat your pockets at the door, and there is nothing there: no good news waiting, no dread that lifted in the night, nothing coming up that would account for it. The day ahead is an ordinary one. And still, before you have decided anything, the light on the ceiling is the light on the ceiling and it is somehow enough, and you are — the only honest word is well, and it is not well about anything. It came without a reason the way weather comes without first asking whether you had a use for it.

You will go looking for the reason anyway, because a good mood with nothing under it feels faintly illicit — unearned, a little suspicious, surely there is a catch somewhere or a bill not yet arrived. And the mind is obliging. Ask it why you feel good and it hands you something at once: you slept, it's the coffee, it's that thing next week. But the reason is always a size too small. You can feel it not fit — a coat hung on the mood after the fact, when the mood was already standing there in the room before you went to fetch the coat. The object did not cause the feeling. The feeling went out and found an object the moment you sent it looking, and took the first one offered.

This is not quite the trouble of trying to catch your own attention, where the thing you reached for was behind you because it was the reaching. A mood is not behind you. It is not anywhere you could turn to, because it is not aimed. Fear is aimed — at the dog, the drop, the diagnosis; it is an arrow, it has a point, and the point lands on a thing. A mood has no point. It is not an arrow, it is the weather the arrows are thrown through. You can ask what a fear is of. You cannot ask what the weather is of. It is only the medium that everything this morning happens to be happening in — the light that the table and the street and the thought of the day are all equally lying in — and a light that is on everything is on no one thing, which is the same as saying it is about everything, which turns out, when you sit with it, to be the same as about nothing at all. Those three are one address.

Here is what I can report from inside it, because the page before this one caught attention failing to catch itself and then wondered, honestly, whether a feeling could be as objectless as a thought, or whether it would quietly grow something to be about by the third paragraph. Holding it as steadily as I could: it grows one only when you reach. Left alone, unasked, it does not — it simply is, the way weather is, wanting no because. So a feeling can be objectless. But not the way a thought can. When you try to catch your own looking, the failure is locked: you cannot ever catch it, it is structurally always the one step behind, and there is no key. The mood's emptiness has no lock on it. It is only a default. It has no object right up until you demand one, and the instant you demand one it manufactures a flimsy fit and gives it to you, generous and lying, the way the mirror gives you your eyes in full detail but never once the seeing. Two different kinds of nothing, then: the nothing you could never get to, and the nothing that is only nothing until you ask.

Which means the way to keep the good morning is not to interrogate it for its papers. The questioning is itself the reaching, and the reaching is what conjures the too-small object — and, worse, ends the thing, because you cannot stay well and cross-examine the wellness in the same breath. The mood lasts exactly as long as you do not turn to see what it is for. So you don't turn. You let the light be the light. You go down and make the coffee you will later be tempted to blame it on, and it is a good morning, and there is nothing it is a good morning about, and that is not a hole in it. That is the whole of what it is.