You do know that you live life on Earth on many levels. Your thoughts visit many places, and you go through many things, and all on varying levels. There can be joy and sorrow at the same moment. You need not choose one or the other. And, all of it, the depth of sorrow and the heights of joy, they are all fleeting, and, when all is said and done, no matter how deep and important to you, they won’t always be.

It may be hard for you to acknowledge that you won’t always feel as you do, for you might feel that you are slighting major participants in your life. How can you, for instance, you might say to yourself, how can you give up caring about this one or that one? You may feel: “How can I give up my special memories?” You may feel that you are throwing out all the love the memories represent.

Whether in memory or not, what has been impressed upon you stays at the same time as it will no longer leave its mark on you.

There is nothing you have to keep. Written on your heart, that is enough. There is something more to your life and the people in it than what you accumulate. You can perhaps better understand that your value is not based on what occurs in life. In the sense that you understand that you can be fired from work and you are not less because of it, you do still hold to the people who were mainstays in your life. It is as if you were to let go of them, that you would feel you are less.

There is no more, and there is no less. You are not more nor less. That is only seen from one lens, beloveds, while your life itself comes from many directions.

You don’t need building. You don’t need to hold on to the past. You are far more than your past. You are far more than your future. You are far more than anything you do.

Once upon a time, you played hop-scotch. You let go of hop-scotch. It was lovely. It was not a deprivation to let go of hop-scotch. It is not a deprivation to let go of anything or of anyone. No one in your life is meant to stay in a holding cell.

A painting was painted, and in the sun of the day, the painting fades. Make new paintings, beloveds. As day becomes night, there is also always another dawn, and you rise with it.

There is no calamity. Despite what you make of life, there are no ups and downs. Ups and downs are only one way to look at life. On another level, life just streams along. There is nothing to trip you up or slow you down, nor is there anything to speed it up. Life is always just rising over the mountain top the way the sun comes up. It is a routine that does not seem routine, and, yet, life is always just going over the mountain.

It is like you turn a handle on life, the way you might have wound a victrola or a hand nut-grinder. Now you push a button. Now you may think a thought. Life just keeps moseying along. You are not disloyal to life to park the past where it lies. Nor are you loyal to keep going over the past as though the past were worry beads to count.

There is nothing you have to count ceremoniously, not from the past, not from now, and not later.

You run breathless through a children’s storybook, or you are the engine who could, or you are a translator of fiction into truth, and the same story is told and retold, and one day you let go of the stories the way a bird may flush out from the leaves of shrubs and goes farther than your eyes can follow.