You can always know that you are not alone. Whether your heart is aching or your heart is full of joy, you are not alone. The verse that says everyone laughs with you and when you cry, you cry alone, is simply not so. It may sound good, yet many laugh with you, and as many cry with you. This is how life is. No matter at what peak you are or at what low point you are, in terms of the world, you have much company. No one has been without pain, and no one has been without joy.

No matter how beautiful, no matter how wealthy, no matter how robust, no matter how unbeautiful, no matter how poor, no matter how ill, everyone on Earth has his good times and names them joy. Everything on Earth is relative. It has been said that no matter how great your sorrow, if you could have the choice to pull another’s troubles out of a hat, you would choose to keep the woes you already have. And, of course, you have made a choice to hold on to your troubles, as if you consider suffering a reward for goodness.

You would be reluctant to trade in your joys for someone else’s. There are times you may think you would, yet your joys are precious to you. Not for all the tea in China would you give away one millisecond of what is precious to you. There you are. Your life is yours. It belongs to you. Your life does not belong to anyone else, nor does anyone else’s life belong to you.

This does not mean that you cannot also have equivalent and greater joys the same as anyone else down the road. You just don’t have the equivalent joys yet. Or, perhaps you have, and supported suffering while you withheld yourself from joy.

No one can take your joys away, just as no one else can give you your joys. You well may receive joy from others, yet no one can choose your joys on your behalf. Joys and sorrows are all your own. You are on your own when it comes to your satisfaction or dissatisfaction in life.

In life, you are not adrift in a sea. There is plenty that you can pick up in the waters. How happy or unhappy you are is up to you. Your emotional state is a conclusion you draw. You are the one who thinks your thoughts. Nobody makes you do it. So far as I can tell, you pick up your thoughts and take them for the gospel. You draw your own conclusions, and you go by them.

One person thinks someone or something is beautiful, and someone else turns up his nose at the very same thing. Thus there are differences of opinions and political parties, and one man’s meat is another’s poison.

Go for what gives you joy. Turn away from what does not give you joy.

Someone asked Me today why one moment he is happy, and the next moment, he is in the pits. Why is an endless question. One why leads to another. I will give you the answer just the same.

The answer to your question as to why you are on high one moment and on a low the next is because you are a human being. That’s the bottom line. Or, rather, as a Divine Being in a human body, you are too often discontent. As yet, you are still here and there, uphill and downhill every which way. Even so, you can forswear despair. Consider despair a gnat that is pestering you.

Let a sense of humor come to your rescue. Despair has come and gone before. Why take a sense of despair so seriously? Turn your despair into humor. Don’t make despair your companion. Courteously nod to your despair, and then look for joy. Don’t compound despair with more despair just because more despair has visited you in the past. Why make it easier to find despair than joy? Don’t sit waiting for joy to find its way to you. Go find it.

Look at your situation with yours eyes wide open. Perhaps you have punished yourself enough, and now it is time to cease being a martyr and go on to greener pastures. Greener pastures await you. Pastures can’t move over to you. It is for you to go over to them. How about now?