I’m finding myself on an emotional roller-coaster lately, experiencing fluctuations in perspective I’m finding difficult to explain. I have experienced no traumatic events recently that can account for my mood swings, so it doesn’t seem reasonable I should be soaring on the rarified air of well-being one minute and descending to the depths of despair the next.

As one might imagine I’m enjoying the highs and dreading the lows, but since I realize fluctuations will occur; what goes up must come down, I should, I suppose, be content to ride along. As I contemplate it all, searching for a rationale, I think I can realistically attribute the phenomenon to aging.

I understand that neuro-scientists are going to great efforts these days to make sense of what exactly constitutes consciousness. A lot of their efforts are about correlating conscious experiences, like the world view before us or our sense of time extension, with specific brain activity, what synapses fire when and where in the brain where it’s all happening.

No easy task, I guess, but one particular difficulty these researchers are having is how to deal with extreme subtleties of consciousness, those experiences that defy verbal representation, like the aesthetic response one might have when hearing a particular musical refrain or the ineffable responses to the smell of flowers on a spring day. To make matters even more difficult the same sounds or the same odor may not elicit the same conscious response experienced a second time.

It seems to me reducing conscious experience to specific brain activity isn’t necessarily a desirable enterprise anyway. Perhaps allowing the ineffable to remain ineffable is a breath of fresh air.

Does one’s mental acuity require an antagonist or are there just some of us who don’t function well without an oppositional push? Having a foil against which I can expend my energies allows for perceived successes, wins, against adversity and will produce a sense of euphoria (short-lived though it will be), that feeds the desire to continue to seek out opposition.

The commonly held desire for peaceful coexistence, the idea of a friction-free Utopia would send many of us into an undesirable state of ennui, although time to rest up between bouts will be welcome.