You may have spent more time and energy on the negative than on the positive. Change this, and see how your life will change. Your thoughts have been an impediment to your appraised life.

Something amazingly wonderful has been given to you, yet you spend a lot of this gift whining about it. You are displeased. Must you extend those moments of displeasure? What do you gain? What do your plaints contribute to the world and others in it?

You have been given a gift. Thank the Giver.

When someone gave you a bauble, your mother taught you to express pleasure. But for the most incredible gift — your lifetime — you gripe. Not once but twice or hundreds of times. Instead of singing the song of life, you may have been sing-songing complaint.

There is no complaint department in Heaven. Complaint does not exist. There are no returns nor exchanges. There is no panel to forward objections to. What choice do you have but to use what you hold in your hand?

You can develop life's muscles. You can bring out the best in it. You can give yourself the gift of appreciation. Why on earth would you deny yourself appreciation? How does that make anything what you want?

Thank God for the life given to you. You are the only one who has it, this particular life. You are a player. Play well. Play for all you've got. Play to beat the band. Raise a flag to yourself. May you wave it proudly.

Have you not been the Princess and the Pea? Have you not been sensitive to every discomfort and perhaps less sensitive to every joy? Haven't you pounced on anything that was disagreeable to you and said Aha? Have you not collected what you see as error and neglected benefit?

You have wrung out what you don't want for all its worth, but there is no worth to wringing out what you didn't want in the first place. You wring it out and hang it on the line to dry over and over again. At any opportunity, you commiserate with yourself about it again and again. How could you be treated so badly, you ask yourself and beat your chest. Don't tell Me you haven't. You have been an expert at turning over every angle of dissatisfaction. You may have even made dissatisfaction your claim to life. You have protested your life. What is the use of protest? Get on with it.

Become a hero to yourself again. You have a wealth of life. Give it its due. Its due is recognition for what you can make it. You have a splendid opportunity to make your life livable. You can even make it excellent. You can expand your life. Wrest the marrow from it. Give up complaint.

When you complain or protest, you hammer into the wall what you say you don't want. You put it up where it can be seen. Did you really want to look at it every day?

Can you not find other pictures to put up, ones more conducive to a better frame of mind?

Can you not change the subject?

Exact the beauty from your life. Discard other than beauty. Do not inflate its importance.

Your earthly life is at stake. Treat it well. It is a temporary guest. Welcome it.

Do not bemoan the past. Wave in the present. Think well of your life.

You are the host of your life. Be gracious to it. Honor it. Endow it.