Swinging Confidence
Does It Happen to You Too?
I suppose everybody has mood swings to one extent or another. I told my granddaughter, Amaya, one day last year, “You are such a happy girl!”
She turned on her just-so voice and said, “No grandpa, sometimes I’m happy and sometimes I’m sad. I get angry too and other times I feel excited.”
I have swinging confidence myself. I wonder how common or uncommon it is. The mood seems to go along with it. When I feel confident, serenity and optimism also fill me. When I feel uncertain, I feel anxious and pessimistic.
Swinging confidence also means swinging belief for me. One day, I feel fully grounded in sacred reality. The next day, doubts haunt me.
I remember wrong beliefs from my younger days (like Presbyterians having better theology than Hindus). Obviously, I adopted these ideas from the people around me. Anyone who lives in a culture does that.
What will my future self say about today’s beliefs? I read this piece by Domagoj Vidovic a few minutes ago. He describes the sponge-like nature of personal beliefs, absorbing ideas from others.
Some of my beliefs, though, are unusual, not like anyone else around me. I swear I can sense the feelings of certain other people remotely. Other times I worry that I am a con artist conning myself.
A few times I have sought confirmation and found it. But you don’t just go around asking your friends every day, “Hey did you have a pleasurable late part of the night last night, followed by a sleep with sweet dreams, followed by restless dreams and then wake up somewhat unsettled?”
To me it is a lonely world if we just “reconstruct” the emotional state of other people based on photons and sound waves. I want to believe there is a direct connection between hearts, however dim it may usually appear in the flood of other senses.
Usually I doubt my doubts away. Sometimes I wonder how much of the connection is in real time and how much is eternal. In other words, might the eternal part of me sense the eternal part of you, but not the temporal part unless we are together physically?
I also wonder if my strong intuitions get scrambled in space-time. Maybe the joy I sense in a loved one at a distance will happen next week. Maybe it happened last week. I would hate to think it is nothing more than projection, lunacy or hallucination.
But then there are those spooky moments when a person will tell me, yes, it happened right when you thought it did. It is hard to explain those away.
Just now I remembered my Dad telling me that he sensed an emotional event in his Mom’s life remotely. I swear I haven’t thought about that story in over a decade. Maybe that’s where I got the idea!
Okay, enough rambling. I am in a mostly uncertain frame of mind right now. How can I be sure? Anybody have thoughts on spiritual confidence?
