Part of the herd

Have you ever noticed how people's moods tend to feed off of each other?

I'm not just talking about how one giddy person can make everyone else silly or how when one person is in a snit the whole office goes down hill fast. Other emotions are catching, as well.

What got me thinking about this was tonight at aikido practice. I don't know who started it, to be honest it might have been me. But I do know that we all had really long days at work and we were all kind of tired. We got going (just three of us and the instructor) and for some reason we all settled into this really intense rhythm. No one cracked a smile for about 15 minutes. We were all staring each other down.

It was scary.