When you go into the woods to pick berries, you know what berries you want to pick, and then you pick the ones that are ripe and ready to pick, so ripe and ready they almost fall into your hand.

Were We to compare berry-picking to your life or to your day, it is like you are picking everything in sight. All sights and sounds come into your range: sour berries, thorns, traffic, horns honking, music, yelling, brambles. It all enters your vision and your hearing and gets stuck somewhere in your mind.

Better to know the berries you want to pick and not amass everything that comes before you in the woods.

As you start your day, what are you looking for? Focus. You don't need to let all the riffraff in. You must not.

If the day is your home, it is not to be Grand Central Station. You do not have to let everyone and everything enter your home. You do not have to receive everything equally. You don't have to let wolves in or bears. You don't have to be open to difficulties. You don't have to let bad news in.

You know you don't need to sign up for every magazine there is.

Transfer this awareness to what you subscribe to in life.

Think of berry-picking. How many berries will you pick in the forest if you pick everything in sight? How far will you get? What will you bring home to eat? What will you have to throw out? You cannot pick up every leaf and twig, and you cannot keep them.

It is like you are voting. You cannot vote for every candidate. They may all be good, and still you have to choose.

I am talking about the events in life. You don't have to register all the commotion in life any more than you have to choose everything in the woods where you pick berries. You can choose which thoughts you want. Maybe you can't avoid the noise, you hear it, and yet you don't have to absorb all of it. You can let some things go.

When you plant seedlings, there may not be room in your garden for all of the seedlings.

There is not room in your head for all the thoughts you keep. Prune your thoughts. Keep those that uplift you, and let go of all those that hold you back. Negative thoughts hold you back. No matter how correct negative thoughts may be, they hold you back. They certainly hold you back from happiness. Your accumulated negative thoughts are your problem. You picked them. You held on to them. You repeated them. They got into your head and stuck there. You bought them. You are the buyer and purveyor of your thoughts.

Consider which thoughts to keep and which to throw out. They are your thoughts, beloveds. Wherever they came from, you can select now which serve you and which do not. Collect your thoughts. Place the negative ones on a newspaper. Then roll the newspaper up around those thoughts and throw them into the trash, not even in the recyclable bin, in the trash. Just throw them out.

Consider negative thoughts like spoiled food. Eventually, you just have to throw out spoiled food. You know better than to keep it, or reheat it, and hope that it is no longer spoiled. Look, you may even have gained a taste for tainted food. Re-educate your taste buds then. Eat some good homemade soup. Wonderful bread. Eat a sweet dessert. You are entitled to good meals. And you are entitled to thoughts that support you and take you places.