Just when you think you've surmounted the littlenesses in life, you find yourself irate over something. You thought you were past all that, and here you go again, deeply annoyed at someone else's thoughtlessness and their way of dealing with life. Yet why must you, a bystander, be so affected?

But your anger and frustration are not about other people, their frailties, their ignorance, their one-sidedness. As you know, this is about you and how you deal with life and another's perceived inadequacies. For all you know, the others may be on earth in their fashion for the express purpose of riling you. Even thorns on roses have a purpose.

By the same token, perhaps you are irate so that the others may gain from your irritation. Well, you cannot figure it out, and you don't have to. You have enough to do to deal with your own feelings and resentments and what you are going to do about them.

You just finish with one episode, and then here comes another calling you to attention, making you sit up and notice the embroilment that steams from you. The outside stirs what is within you. All these others pull out the splinters that already exist in your heart.

Are others' failings really so important to you that you must hop to their tune? You were disappointed at how those you perceive as others deal with life and deal with you, and now you feel let down. Why are you surprised, beloveds, over and over again that others think and maneuver in life differently from you? By what divine right are you the prosecutor of other people's energies or lack thereof? And where is it said that others' thoughts are to rule your own?

Your divine right is to love despite error. But so long as you are so discontent with yourself, you will find plenty of fault around you and honor it to the extent that it takes over your life. You skip and hop from one annoyance to another. Find another way.

You can deal with life and not be so frustrated by it. When did you decide to let wrongs rule your life? You wrong yourself, just as those who feel wronged by you wrong themselves. Your anger and frustration are too high a price to pay for another's failings.

I suggest you settle what you see as their debts now. Settle with them in your heart. This does not mean that you don't deal with situations. It means you deal with them and leave your weapons of defense and assault behind you. There is no need for them. If every time you were annoying to another and they were outraged and combatted you, you would be unable to get up. You would be laid so low you wouldn't have the strength to fault another.

But you are able to get up, for many have dealt with you kindly. Now you can return the courtesy to all those who appear before you, no matter how bedraggled, no matter how unfeeling, no matter how foolish, no matter how irritating they may be. If they are irritating, you don't have to be. You don't have to be right any more than they have to be wrong.

They struggle in life as you do. They surface for air. They make choices just as you do, only theirs are different choices. When you remember Oneness, you won't be so quick to think there are two sides and that the sides are opposed. You are all bumbling souls on earth, making your way as best you can, teaching each other there is more to life than the eye can presently see.