Today you will give yourself a vacation from worry and all that which has been pressing on your mind. Today remove whatever pressure you have imposed on yourself, and take a holiday from it. This is giving yourself peace from all the thoughts that assail you. They have had their say. Now listen to the quietness of love.

You need have no loyalty to concerns. You are not a better person to carry any form of woe, past or future, on your shoulders. Present woe does not exist. When you are in the present, woe cannot be. Woe is not admitted to the present. Only peace is. Only love is. The present can contain nothing but eternity and that which is eternal.

Woe falls off. Woe is a momentary aberration. It is a blip on a screen. Woe cannot stay, for by its nature it is ephemeral. But you make woe a mighty adversary who pursues you. But it is your own shadow that you pursue. You open your cloak and admit woe and protect it.

You may accept that the woe is of your making but not the trouble it comes from. You consider the trouble real. You may admit, perhaps, that woe is an add-on that you have purchased at a great price. You have complemented trouble with woe, and kept them as treasured objects. You have tattooed them on your heart. You have collected them and encased them. You have built a shrine for them, to which you bow down daily. You are weighted down with your obligation. You curry favor with that which you claim you do not want. And yet you shelter what you do not want and keep it under your wing and nurture it.

You give great honor to all the troubles of the world, yours and others. You give them great credence.

Give as much attention to the worthy goods in the world as you do to the less agreeable ones. Leap across the potholes and spend time in the meadows of your heart. Place all happiness in your pocket as you would a handkerchief.

Even the world gave you permission for the pursuit of happiness. Is it token permission? Whose permission do you need anyway? Collect happiness. Put that in the basket you carry over your arm. Keep happiness dear. Toss out all the weeds and other paraphernalia you have picked up along the way and kept under your protection.

That which you prefer to keep, keep. Disband all else. Joy belongs to you. It is your birthright. It is your only birthright. Pain and suffering and worry and unhappiness do not belong to you, and you do not have to keep them. Let them be a bug you are astonished to find on your sleeve. You see it, and you brush it off. It has naught to do with you. You just happened to be there like a limb of a tree for it to alight on. It is perfectly all right to brush it off. You are not beholden to it just because it somehow landed on you. It could have landed on the sidewalk as well.

Be then more like an impersonal sidewalk. It keeps on being sidewalk whatever walks on it. It is not overtaken. It wears well. Rains wash it. Sun shines on it. It is undismayed and unattached. It keeps on being sidewalk, available to everything, succumbing to nothing.

Cast off that which is castable. Keep only what belongs. Keep only that which is rightfully yours. Do not keep that which is not.