What is so hard about taking life in your stride? What are your objections? What are your choices?

You may have chosen to take life in your stride sometimes but not always. You can curse at every obstacle that appears before you. You can kick and scream. You can lie down and let the train run over you. You can go eat some ice cream in the hopes that this will calm you. You can go dancing. You can help someone. You can read a book. You can be a friend to yourself, or you can be an instigator of woe.

For how long would you want to keep a friend who constantly reminds you that life has bamboozled you, that it has thrown tacks in your path? For how long would you want to hear this?

And, yet, have you not been that sort of friend to yourself? "Watch out, watch out," may have been the theme of your life. "Danger ahead. Take caution."

It is good to get your mind off your troubles. It is even better to tip your hat at your troubles and see them in perspective. You can let them be the focus of your life, or you can put them in their place and focus on what gives meaning to your life. Surely, obstacles aren't the meaning of your life, nor are they the substance. When you focus on what interrupts your joy, you are not focusing on joy. Truly, dear ones, focusing on troubles is like taking poison. You fuel yourself with tainted thoughts. Troubles are not meant to be your reason for being. Troubles are not meant to envelop you. You are not meant to foment over them.

Look at life and so-called troubles in life like weather. The weather is always changing. What you call good or bad weather is a fact of life, and weather comes and goes. Who would let the outer circumstance of the weather ruin his day, let alone his life? Yet you may have let daily preoccupation with changing circumstances rule your day and often ruin it. Beloved, be happy anyway. Beloved, whistle a happy tune.

Outside circumstances, even the wonderful circumstances, are not the making of you. I made you, and I made you whole. I did not make you to kneel at the whim of what occurs. Outer events are not to mold you. I already made you. Outer life is not to recreate you. You are not flim-flam.

You are My child, and I made you love. I didn't make you to be love only some of the time. I did not make you utterly dependent upon what goes on around you. Who but you has done that? You may have decided that you are the yo-yo of the world, and, so, you have given untoward events power of you. You have made them the ruler of you. You have made them dictators. You have made them dictate your moods and sense of well-being.

Have you done that? Why would you do that? By default? Have you thought that you have no choice, that how you feel is forever at the mercy of something outside you?

From this day forward, take a holiday from fret and worry. Fret and worry are as helpful to you as a headache. They are even less helpful, for they will never leave on their own. The true state of affairs is that they are dependent on you. Fret and worry are nothing without you. They can only survive when they get you to tire yourself out with them and give your life over to them.

Be forgiving with life. Upstream or downstream, according to your view, life is spreading before you. Bless your life. Change your mind and occupy it with thoughts that get you somewhere. Enough of going around in circles.