You know how sometimes you can stare into an eddy of water and it is as if your eyes become glued there and it is hard to break way — the water eddies, and your eyes stay still. Your eyes are fixed. You are almost in a trance.

That is how you often are with life. Life is moving all around you, and your eyes are fixed on one spot. The same way an idea gets stuck in your head and you can't get your mind off it. You stare at life but don't really see. You saw life one way once, and you continue to see it that way. Even when the vista before you changes, you are perhaps looking at it from old eyes. And, so, you are gripped in the past. Life flashes before you, but you don't see it because your eyes are fixed in one place.

Move your eyes away from the spot they have become fastened to, and let your eyes see a bigger purview. See what you have never seen before. See what you would like to see. You can see whatever you want. You can make of what you see whatever you want. So, then, why be stuck with old ways of seeing the world when you can see the world anew and get more than a glimpse of it.

Life in the world doesn't stay still. Why then would your impression of it?

Many of My beautiful blessed children see the world as they once were instructed to by those who saw the world as they had been instructed to, often as a dangerous place, filled with mines and treachery. Of course, they walk with their heads down and wary on all sides.

How can you relax when you predict danger around every corner? You have had a predilection for danger, peril, hurt, distress, anxiety. Isn't it time you trade those in for enjoyment, for an easy-going relationship with life, for even, perhaps, a love affair with life? Why not be enamored with life? Instead of feeling stuck in it, why not embrace it? Why not dance with it for all you are worth? Why not make a commitment to life? Be married to life, but not to your perception of it.

Become an artist of change. Be a master receiver of change. Why balk at what is inevitable on Earth? Sometimes you protest like a small child. You wanted a certain food, and your mother gave you another, and you have a tantrum about it or at least get yourself into a tizzy.

If you cannot at this moment give life a huge embrace, can you at least give it a pat on the shoulder? Can you converse with it, listen to it, get along with it? Can you help it along?

Life is not your opponent. It is not out to get you. You are the one who has set traps. And you are the one who can get out of them.

Consider life to be your good fortune which, indeed, it is.

Do not protest life. It is a gift given to you to do with as you will.

It doesn't matter what the past has been. I know it matters to you, but you can let go of it. Take the benefit of the past to make new inroads now. No need to find the past time and time again. No need at all, unless you happen to like being stuck.

Something in the past was good. And if it wasn't, anyway you survived it.

Start today anew. Let loose of your old impressions. You are not what you used to be. You are better. You never were what someone else thought of you. They didn't have eyes to see. But you do. Now you open your eyes and you see a magnificent world before you, a world like a river that contains many leaping fish, one after the other, and all you have to do is look.