Despair is not to follow you. Shrug it off. You may feel that there is nothing you can do when darkness of soul overcomes you, yet it is for you to part with darkness. Be happy anyway. The world does not end. It’s like you tripped and fell. That’s when you pick yourself up, rub off whatever has stuck to your clothes, and then you walk forward again. This is what to do in life. Pick yourself up, and keep walking.
Don’t squeeze every drop of anguish from whatever tripped you. It’s done. Now make it be over. Get on.
When you literally fall in mud, let’s say, you don’t stay there wallowing. And when you get up, you don’t keep the mud on you. You scrape it off and take a shower and change your clothes.
If you fell and cut your knee, the cuts will heal. Scrapes are scrapes, yet they transform and become scars. Scars show healing. Don’t take pics of your scars. Don’t put the pics in the album of your mind and keep going back and ruffling through the pages.
Now I want to tell you something. Although it’s true, you had a fall which you consider a fall from grace, when, Beloveds, did you allow yourself to feel grace to fall from?
The dismay or hurt or sense of loss doesn’t really come from the outside event. It is in you all the time. It’s there waiting to be pounced on. You are ready for it even though you don’t want it. Whatever emotions arise, they come from you and not from an outer event. When a match is struck, it becomes fire. You are like the match that lights itself up. Unless the match contains sulphur within, the fire won’t burn.
Well, you have the point now. Everything is within you.
The hardest of all for you to believe may be that love is within you. Love is always within you. Something outside may stir that love within you to arise. It is the same with the emotions you would prefer not to have, yet do have.
I do not single you out, you understand. A sense of impatience arises from within, not from the supposed cause. If impatience were not within you, it wouldn’t arise. When a sense of loss arises, something knocked on its door. Yes, latent mourning comes out. You learned grief. You learned that it was appropriate. You learned. Perhaps it was inborn. Regardless, it’s yours now.
How do you remove strife and grief, or skip over them, and not give them their due? How do you not linger over sorrow and hardness of heart and keep them lively? Of course, the best you can, you get up and go on your merry way. You don’t have to carry grief within you. When it comes to love, choose love because love is absolutely built-in. Love comes from within. It’s here within you. Bring it up front.
All the rest, anything that disturbs your sleep and peace of mind is a hitchhiker, and you can drop off a hitchhiker. You don’t have to give a hitchhiker a free ride. Or, if you already have picked him up, you can drop him off.
Keep to you what you want to keep to you. Let go of what you don’t want to keep to you. You don’t have to keep something you don’t want. Whatever negativity assails you, be done with it. Turn your mind in a different direction and reap joy. Why not reap joy? Why reap anything but joy?