Perhaps you have wound yourself up too tight. Perhaps you have demanded too much from yourself and from life. You may have stamped your foot in frustration to protest life's lack of consideration for you. You may blame life or you may blame yourself or both. You may feel you haven't moved fast enough and that life has set up roadblocks for you, obstinately challenging your every move.

When you feel blocked, sit back a while, and let everything catch up to itself. When life doesn't move fast enough or strongly enough for you, let go of the reins for a while. Float. Assign yourself other tasks.

Perhaps you have been in the front lines and now it is time for you to be a medic to yourself. Recline. Sip lemonade. Read a novel. Take naps. Let your wounds heal.

Be slow of limb. Be on vacation. Even as you live life, be on vacation from it. Stop the pacing. Be a train that sits on the track for a while.

If you feel you are going nowhere, then stop where you are.

Reconnoiter.

Pause.

Close your eyes.

Find a hammock.

Have more consideration for yourself. It is not selfish to rest. It is not selfless to wear yourself out. Pace yourself. No one else will do it for you.

All is not lost. When you go to bed at night, you do not take sleep as defeat. When you breathe, you do not consider the breath in as a waste of time and only the breath out as having merit. You favor both.

Yet you perhaps have thought that only spending life had merit, that only wearing yourself out is meritorious, and that outward return is the value to be set on you. Yet you cannot fruitfully manufacture life. You don't have the say on results. Your demands do not have to be met. Life may well not serve your purposes, even when they are benevolent. You serve life best when you strive less.

Since when did ambition become your King? Since when did you give obeisance to ambition? Ambition is an ambit. It is not the sayer of your worth. Worldly ambition is a decoy. Accolades of the world are a small reward. Let your reward be in the service you give, not in how the world views it. Let not the accolades of the world exalt you. Let not the world's indifference reduce you.

What do the plaudits of the world have to do with you? They may buoy you for a while, but not for long. You are meant for more than the mercurial up's and down's of the world. The world can only give you small change. Even when you are drowned in praise from the world, you have been shortchanged.

The world cannot sustain your heart. Only you and I can do that. Look not so much to the world. Have you not been waiting for the world to give you acclaim? I am telling you that you are worth more than whatever the world can possibly give you. The world doesn't know what it has in you. It doesn't know your worth. Even if you are famous, no matter how the world treasures you, your relationship with the world is simply not enough for you. The world cannot reach high enough. It is not equal to you.

Look to Me. Meet My eyes. Fill your heart with My love. I give it to you freely. Don't worry about earning it. When you say you have to earn My love, that is the same as saying you are not yet worth My love. I say you are. Be magnanimous enough to accept My love. At My behest, accept it. Then you will be a giver to the world.