Always go higher. In any situation that troubles you, you haven't gone high enough. It is not that you are not thinking. It is that you are thinking only one way and not another. When you are in the brambles, the thing to do is to get out. So must you with your thoughts. Sometimes your thoughts put you in a hard situation. What if the situation is not what you think it is at all? Can you not look at it differently? You must look at it differently. You must let go of the assumptions you have made. There are ideas that are for you to let go of. You cannot be rigid. You cannot hold others to your standards. They do not have to live up to them. They may not even be able to live up to their own.

You perhaps see a situation and interpret it as meaning the people involved no longer love you or no longer love you enough. You see them as letting you down, discounting you and your feelings. You are interpreting, beloveds, as the world interprets. And the world says that one action is okay and another is not. And yet it is you who has bought that judgment. "This should never have happened," you say, and so you justify the stand you take. You see as an affront that which has nothing to do with you. Even when it impacts you, it has nothing to do with you. The decision is not based on you. You are not less worthy because of a decision anyone else makes.

Even in personal relationships where everyone in the world would call you the victim, even then, no one is doing anything to you. Another's decision may hurt you deeply, yet all that anyone is doing is trying to find his happiness. Good choice, poor choice, that is his choice. It is not yours to make. You are not to hold anyone in your thrall. You are not the decision-maker. Your decision is to rise above, perhaps even love anyway. Certainly, another's decision is not for you to disparage nor dishonor. Someone made a choice that is not to your liking. It is not a choice you like. It may well be a choice you would not make. Still, it is not yours to make.

A wife may love her husband very much. If her husband chooses to leave her for another woman, he has not done anything to her. His choice was not based on hurting her. He made a choice the bereaved wife did not want him to make. It may be the poorest choice in the world, and yet it is his to make. A wife cannot make it for him. He is not her chattel. Whatever the world says, this does not make him a bad guy. It makes him a husband who has chosen to change the parameters of a relationship. Because he made one choice and not another is not a capital offense. He didn't set out to hurt his wife nor his children. The wife must not judge him as unfeeling nor cruel nor stupid or anything at all. An arrangement in life is changing.

The wife can be bitter and revengeful; she can say he did a moral wrong. She can say all manner of things, and yet where is this love of hers that she so proclaimed? Her husband did nothing to her. He chose a course in his life that affects her, and yet he did nothing to her. He did not set out to do anything to her. He chose the way he chose. He had his own conflict about it. He may still.

The wife must not see herself as an injured party. For her own sake, she must not. Now it is left for her to rise above. Now she does what is before her, and that is to rise above.