Mr. Gloom and Mr. Happy

This time I would like to talk about Mr. Gloom and Mr. Happy. The weak-hearted Mr. Gloom is always thinking on the negative side about the worst scenario and how things are not going well. Sometimes he is prone to sobbing. In contrast, the strong-hearted Mr. Happy is always thinking on the positive side and with a cheerful outlook. Sometimes he even gets carried away into a happy-go-lucky mood.

For example, suppose there is a glass that is one-third full of juice. While Mr. Gloom will lament that there is only one-third of the juice remaining, Mr. Happy will say gleefully that there is still one-third left.

Mr. Gloom and Mr. Happy go on a journey together. What on earth is going to happen? Readers, please by all means carry on the story yourself.

To let you in on more of the details, while Mr. Gloom hails from the world of depression, Mr. Happy comes from the world of fanaticism. Shade and light. Yin and yang. Negative and positive. Minus and plus . . . .

People describe others as either gloomy or cheerful. We spend our days making such evaluations and judgments and end up putting everyone into one of these categories. In doing so, almost everyone believes that they themselves are Mr. Happy, and they are completely indifferent to the fact that others might see them as Mr. Gloom. This categorization might be important for us in our daily lives, but did God really create people in this way?

It was 14 years ago when I first specifically discovered the existence of Mr. Gloom and Mr. Happy. I was in hospital at the time. Hospitals are strange places at night. When the true nature of your illness is still not certain, you think only about whether you are going to remain in this world or move on to the next world. Why do we think like this? It was in contemplating this question that I discovered Mr. Gloom and Mr. Happy.

Mr. Gloom falls steadily into the murky waters of pessimism and weeps. He takes on a heavy, dark expression and sinks rapidly. Mr. Happy looks on with a smiling face and remarks cheerfully that Mr. Gloom is a really useless fellow. Then Mr. Happy shouts “Okay, that’s enough,” seizes Mr. Gloom’s back, and pulls him up. If the farsighted Mr. Happy were not there to say “Okay, that’s enough,” it would be the end.

For me, it was a very significant discovery indeed. Most importantly, I understood that everyone has both a Mr. Gloom and a Mr. Happy and that in the end Mr. Happy embraces Mr. Gloom and leads him in the right direction. In other words, in our minds we have both depression and mania. We do not have only depression or only mania; they exist side by side and relative to each other. Our lives change tremendously depending on whether or not we can control our minds.

When talking with people who had terminal cancer, I told them the story of Mr. Gloom and Mr. Happy. In the end, those people went on to the next world. But if Mr. Happy was there gently hugging Mr. Gloom on their journey, that, I think, would have been wonderful and those people would have been happy.

Please take this opportunity to have a look at the Mr. Gloom and Mr. Happy within you and to talk with them. I’m sure you will become much more broad-minded if you do.