The success of your life does not go up and down according to your wishes fulfilled. This is an important understanding to accept. If the harmony and beauty of your life depend upon the fulfillment of your will, your happiness will be peremptory. Your happiness requires a basis more solid than your perception of gain or loss.

Yet this is what so many of My children base their happiness on, as if you can't be happy unless your will is followed. Alas, this is not the road to happiness. This is a road to unhappiness.

I agree it feels wonderful when what you desire is fulfilled, yet that wonderfulness may sometimes even turn around and bite you. Your desire may have been right at the time, yet the joy of its fulfillment may have been short-lasted. You might later even wish that your desire had not been fulfilled. It didn't work out, or it worked out to your seeming disadvantage. Fulfilled desires are not always what they are cracked up to be. Do you agree with this?

By the same token, not getting your desires fulfilled can be a good thing. That must be so. So why is your happiness so much in the balance depending upon what desires of yours are fulfilled or not?

Sometimes you fight tooth and nail to get something you want, and, then, when you have it, what have you got? So why is your happiness so dependent upon your level of achievement? Why would you do that to yourself?

Oh, yes, it's nice to get all A's in school, and, yet, even if you don't get an A, A is not the measure of your success. It is too risky to have your sense of well-being dependent upon occurrences and events in your life.

A better measure, although measure need not be, is what you have given to your life, not in stress and strain, but in joy. What are you happy for, glad for, grateful for? There is a limitless list. Maybe you need only one item on your list and that is your love of life. Yet, maybe not even that item is needed. Maybe simply your living is enough.

You are an angel on Earth who is living life. You are alive in a human form on Earth. This day you live and breathe. This day you surface in the world. Maybe this is enough. Today you are like a deep-sea diver who comes up from the depths to the surface, and you take another breath, and you dive down to where the pearls are, and you bring them up. You are the pearl you bring up. You are your gift to the world.

The surface of the sea may be rough or smooth, and yet how much does the surface have to do with you? How paramount is the surface when you enjoy diving in and out?

The world is transitory. Your Being is not. In what water you swim is one thing. You, the swimmer, are another. You and the world do interface, and yet you are the key to the world. The world is not the key to you. The world is a wrapping. You are far more than a wrapping. You are the point. You are the point of it all. The chair you sit in is not more worthy than you. What you can count is not more worthy than you. You are the most worthy brush in My paint box. You are the one who lies at the end of the rainbow. It is you, and it is I. So great are We, there is no measure but Our Existence.