I said toy store, not candy store. The variety is great in both cases, yet the dimensions of toys offered are generally greater.

A candy store plays one sweetness and flavor off another, whereas a toy store covers a greater range of content, motion, and use. There are toys to play house with. There are motorized cars and ditch diggers. There are workplace toys, recreational toys. There are games for all ages and live action games. Toys come in all sizes and shapes. The uses to which toys can be put are limitless, and toys, once used can be used again. They are definitely reusable and recyclable. Even a broken wheel can become something wonderful with imagination.

In making movies, sometimes the directors use toy cars to show a demolition. The scene is photographed in such a way that it looks like a life-size presentation.

Oftentimes, you take life-size situations and magnify them to giant-size. You may double or triple a normal-sized event, exaggerating its importance. Will you admit to that?

If movies can make toy scenes look life-like, is it possible you can take life-size scenes in your life and reduce them in your mind to toy-size situations? Or make a board game of them? Can you find some way to reduce the importance that situations in life hold for you? Instead of enormous, can you make situations tiny? Perhaps you can make problems small enough to fit in the bottom of your purse where you might forget about them. Or perhaps you can toss them over a fence.

The truth of it, beloveds, is that you have often looked at a thimble-sized bump in the road, and you have seen it as a giant crater like one on the moon. Your eyes popped open wide, and what you saw startled you. And you saw so close-up, and what you saw so magnified, that you, beloved, reduced yourself in size. When that happens, close your eyes awhile, and then later you can open them and see with less hysteria and more strength.

Yes, beloveds, you need not take the game of life so seriously. It is only a game, here today and gone tomorrow. It is over before you begin inasmuch as it is only a game to start with. It is not life or death. Even real life, contrary to your perception and emotions, is not life or death. Truly, beloveds, it is life and life, and that's all there is. Life and life. Actually, there is only life and no comparison to make, nothing to choose, because there is only life everlasting. Life on Earth is like a paper boat that floats on the water in the bathtub. Even the hardest parts of what you call life wash away and evaporate without a trace.

If your life is an ink sketch, it is drawn in washable ink. It is never ever carved in granite. Even if it were, the indentations would soon erode. If your life is messy, you can wash it down in an instant with a hose. See that grime go.

Life on Earth, no matter how personal to you, no matter how seriously you take it, is merely a boat going merrily merrily down the stream. It is no more than a bubble. It is a tiny lapse in memory. It is an empty space taken up with drama. The drama goes away, and the empty space remains even where there is no such thing as space. But there is such a thing as silence. You dwell in a hall of silence, beloveds. You are hearing noise made only by rubbing sticks on a washboard. Rub-a-dub-dub.