Mood Indigo

I spent most of yesterday in a melancholy frame of mind. Since January, when I started my new business, I have not had a steady source of income, and my tax accountant had just let me know that we owed taxes for 2011 in an amount that would make a serious dent in our emergency fund.

After wallowing in self-pity and a bout of tears, I gave myself a mental kick in the pants and took myself off to the gym.

But not even a hard workout in a spin class with the instructor's iPod blasting out songs loud enough to get your heart pumping could help me shake off my blues.

An hour later my body still felt heavy laden, and trying to summon a smile made me feel like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill only to have it come right back down him every time.

Before the advent of modern medicine, melancholia was understood primarily as a physical state caused by an excess of black bile, one of the four humors whose excesses could also produce sanguine (impulsive), phlegmatic (cautious), or choleric (aggressive) dispositions.

Although we think of melancholy now as primarily an emotional state, its physiological symptoms are no less a part of the experience.

In his "Ode on Melancholy," Keats described melancholy as a “fit” that falls “sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud/That fosters the droop-headed flowers all/And hides the green hill in an April shroud.”

I have found no more precise rendering than Keats' poem of what I felt. It came upon me as unexpectedly as the first thunderclap of a storm, and the grey, cold, cloudy day mirrored my emotions as clearly as a looking glass reflects my face.

So what did I finally turn to for solace?

I found a cafe where I could be among people but have no obligation to share my thoughts or emotions with anyone, opened my laptop, and started writing.

In a few minutes I was in another world, reading editorials, finding stats to bolster my arguments, checking an online thesaurus to find precisely the right word to express my point of view.

Writing takes me out of myself in a way that no other activity can. When I'm thinking this hard about what I want to say next, about what sentence fits and what needs to go into my editorial rejection bin, I lose track of time and place.

Finishing my posting was like coming out of a trance, and I found that neither sadness, nor fear, nor self-pity predominated among my emotions. Instead, I felt the satisfaction of a task completed, proof that I could still create, and gratitude for all the people who read my words and respond to them.

Today I found Keats' poem on melancholy and discovered that like many great writers he had not only put my emotions into words but had also given me words to take me out of my sadness:

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies

All of those images rose up in my mind's eye as I read the words, and I found I could smile-- effortlessly.