Little by little, what I say every day is beginning to sink in and become a part of you. Oh, yes, offense-producing annoying situations and people still arise. How can this happen, yet it does. And you may still feel strongly that you want to retaliate in kind. You may want to tell off some people. You may want to tell them how rude and inconsiderate and unintelligent they are. You are sure of it, and yet you pause, and yet you refrain and you find mulling within you a greater consideration and understanding, and, yes, even compassion. You find you don't want to set them straight anymore.

You are learning to release. You are learning to release expectations. And you are learning to release the past. Past and future are two major things to release. And what are the past and future to you but memories or imaginings or demands that you make of them or wish to undo? You want to reinvent the past and command the future, yet past and future are what they are. The present is what it is too. What is, is. And so you release the present as well. You hold on to nothing.

Your heart, your beautiful heart! It is your heart, beloved. It is the midpoint between the world and Heaven. It has its feet in two boats. One boat is anchored in Heaven, and one boat is wobbly on Earth. Heaven is your love boat, beloveds. And the Earth boat seems to have no anchor, though, of course, Heaven is its anchor. There would be no Earth life without Heaven to secure it.

Do you see how a great deal of your present woe is accumulation of the past? You keep the past in an old trunk in the attic of your mind, and you go up into the attic and you sort and re-sort all sorts of these belongings. They are called belongings, what you have stored in this old trunk, but they are not your belongings. They are old belongings. Old belongings were never really yours either, yet you have kept them in an old trunk in the attic.

Certainly, you feel there are days in your life that you would skip. You would like to leave out the day you flunked a big test, the day a loved one died, the day you told a hurtful lie, the day you broke your leg, the day of a hurricane, and so on. Yet, beloveds, those days too were precious to you. If I told you I would remove heartrending days from your life, you would not be sure about it. You would hem and haw.

Beloveds, it is not all that you have to do that makes you tense. It is all you haven't done. It is the accumulation of the past that tires you. The solution is so simple. Do not accumulate the past even in the sense of day-to-day things to do. Perhaps what is left undone can stay undone. Maybe it doesn't matter. In any case, do not keep carrying it over your shoulders for then you get weighed down.

Good morning, My beloved children, who struggle and twist and turn in life because you believe you have to in order to exist. And so you enter the fray. That is your error, that you believe it is necessary to fight life. Therefore you parry and thrust for all you are worth, and you wear yourself out with fighting ghosts when you could befriend them.