This past Monday was Blue Monday, the saddest day of the year. Seriously, it’s a thing. You can look it up. It was established in 2005, and it’s determined by considering all kinds of factors that might contribute to your mood: motivational level, financial debt, the weather, the fading joy of the holidays, the reality of failed New Year’s resolutions, etc. You may have seen social media posts about it with all kinds of advice about self care.
It makes for a great story. And in fact, it’s a complete fiction - a marketing ploy. You can’t, after all, measure the “fading joy of the holidays,” and you might have noticed that the weather is a decidedly regional phenomenon. So a travel company in England created Blue Monday as a gimmick to generate sales to tropical destinations. They even paid a psychologist to create the “formula.” Cardiff University, where he worked, promptly distanced themselves from him as a former part-time employee.
That’s the thing with our thoughts, especially our thoughts about ourselves. They’re stories. We tend to believe that our thoughts are rooted in reality. And they are, sort of. But then we slather layers of anxiety or hope or fear on top of that reality, and our thoughts become more like stories.
Or we believe our thoughts are uniquely ours -- that they are a part of our core essence. Buddhist psychology frames thinking as just another form of perception. Just as we see objects and hear sounds, we think thoughts. Thoughts emerge from the way various stimuli (internal and external) interact. They’re no more “ours” than the chair we see or the wind we hear. And when we identify with the thoughts we have -- “I’m pretty sad today” -- we give them a weight that they don’t have as plain thoughts. Instead of saying, “I’m pretty sad today,” what if we said, “that was a sad experience”? See the difference? By using “I,” we’re making the thought ours. Is there any authority saying you have to do that? Is there any evidence that you own the thought? It’s just a thought.
So next time you’re walking by a friend and they don’t acknowledge your existence, think about the story you tell yourself. Airpods have probably made a lot of people’s friends feel a lot less secure.
As for Blue Monday, it turns out it’s just another story too. Monday might be real, but blue is the color of the sky and the sea, of depth and infinity.
Let’s move into a practice and let all this sink in...
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