There is no value in keeping a scorecard of your life. To gauge your life according to a scale of a remote standard is to find your life wanting. You cannot find merit without the shadow of demerit tagging along.
What is this rush to make your life better? Can you not find happiness where it already lies? Can you not relish each moment as it is served to you. Are you to pick and choose your life? Must you take your life to task and scold it?
Perhaps you presently consider your earth life a life sentence, a term of survivalship you must serve. You need not stand up to life nor hide from it nor endure it with teeth clasped. You are simply to sail on it. The ship you are on is most certainly moving forward and taking you with it.
Do not predict the storms. Do not prepare for them. You cannot prepare for them except by programming danger. Your thoughts plant mines along the way.
Life will sometimes go your way, and sometimes it will not. The question is not how much your life follows your will. The question is: What is the optimum way for you to engage in life?
Is it not better to make a friend of life rather than a foe. You have an eternal relationship with life and a temporary one with life on earth. This life on earth is not the mainstay of your existence. It is not the whole story, for your life holds great meaning. You are rowing across the course of your life. Row lightly.
If you must think in terms of good or bad, then think in terms of good. What is the possible gain in earmarking your life as difficult or lagging or unfit? The definition of your life is the one you make. Think neither of triumph nor defeat. To say you make the best of your life indicts your life to a sorry state. Bless your life instead.
What if your life is a gloriful life? What if you are exactly on the right path, and those who row near you are also on the right path? What if, as you row, everything is left behind you? Nothing piles up and nothing detracts.
Look at your arms that row. How strong they are, how beautifully they glide the oars! How magnificent are you, the rower of your boat, never looking back, always meeting the sea as refreshing new waves!
In order for life to be a struggle, there must be something to oppose, something to resist. Begin now by making no complaints about your life. Do not compartmentalize it and put it away. You are in the midst of it. Love it.
You row your boat, and the high seas take you where they will. Is there controversy in this? Are you to tell the wind which way to blow and when? Are you to tell the stars their place in the Heavens? Are you to circumvent life or to sail along with it?
Watch how you identify the ship of your life. Do not name it Hazard or Pain. If your life has hazard and pain, it also has Beauty and Joy. Paint the name Fulfillment on the ship of your life.
You may not choose all that befalls in your life, but you do choose the Name by which you call it.