I am currently mired in the first stages of end-of-term grading, but one thing that I have been thinking about recently is what might be called 'seasons of the soul'.
We have what are called passions, things that we undergo on particular occasions because something moves us to undergo them. There are many different kinds of passions, but an old tradition recognizes a list of four principal passions, called so because they are those passions to which other passions tend, and therefore mark general categories of passion or of the kinds of processes that unfold in passions: hope, fear, joy, and sorrow. They are usually distinguished according to possession versus anticipation of object on the one hand and goodness or badness of object on the other:
hope: anticipated good
fear: anticipated bad
joy: possessed good
sorrow: possessed bad
'Hope' in this scheme is sometimes replaced by 'desire'; whatever the term one uses, the essential idea is being moved toward an anticipated good. Again, there are other passions besides these four -- love, hatred, daring, anger, despair being commonly mentioned ones -- but these are the ones that are in some sense most directly related to any possible object of passion.
Passions are, as the name implies, passive, forms of being-affected by something. When the passions are involved in active responses to things, we call this passion-action complex an 'emotion', although in practice English does not distinguish passions and emotions at all, resulting in what I think is an almost universal confusion about human motivation on every single topic to which it is relevant.
Passions and emotions are occurrent and occasional. But we also speak of 'moods'. A 'mood' literally is a way the mind is; in Germannic languages, the word and its cognates were always originally associated with something like what the Greeks called thymos, the heart, the natural courage, the capacity for zeal, but in English this has been generalized. It is very difficult to pin down, but I think we can see it as the overall tenor of an entire extended process of passions and emotions. A melancholy mood will cover many different kinds of passions and emotions; it can even include joyful passions and celebratory emotions. But the overall movement of the passions and emotions in a melancholy mood carries a theme of sedateness tending to sorrow. In a melancholy mood, you might expect sorrow to be recurring and joy, while possible, to be dampened. In an irascible mood, you would expect anger, at least incipient anger, to be recurrent and joys and hopes to be dampened. A pleasant mood would tend toward passions associated with good objects and have dampened versions of any passions with bad objects. And so forth.
But it seems that there is something beyond moods, which is what I am calling 'seasons'. As moods are the overall tenor of an entire extended process of passions and emotions, seasons are the overall tenor of a somewhat coherent process of passions, emotions, and moods for an extended part of our lives. Human beings have lives with joyful seasons and sorrowful seasons, irritable seasons and hopeful seasons, seasons of fear and of love and of hatred. Some seasons are tempestuous, some are quiet. Because they last relatively long periods -- anything from weeks to decades -- I think seasons play a significant role in our life-choices. The kinds of choices we tend to make in a joyful season are very different from the kinds of choices we tend to make in a sorrowful season. Tempestuous seasons result in different patterns of choice than quiet seasons, and hopeful seasons in different patterns than fearful seasons. And, of course, since seasons are the overall tenor of very complex things, they can have all sorts of variations and subtleties that over a period affect our choices. For that reason, getting a sense of the season you are currently living through plays a significant role in making prudent decisions.
