Today we ask that you take a good, long look at the things that you “stress about.”
What does this mean?
Many of you walk through life with a continual clamor of stressful thinking going on in your mind. You worry, worry, worry. It is a very sad thing to see.
Children and teenagers, who should be at play and enjoying the bright fresh energy of youth, are burdened by worry — often worry which their well-meaning, but worried, parents impose on them from an early age.
As life progresses, these worried young people age into worried middle-aged people, bogged down by a million cares. Life is a miserable chore, a series of events to be slogged through until one reaches “retirement.” At which point of course the aging human lives in a chronic state of worry about his health and mortality.
So what is going on here is that vast numbers of humans are living perfectly good lives in a state of abject misery. We are not talking about deep impoverishment, as one finds in less developed countries. We are talking about the kind of people who might be reading these words — even open, spiritually-minded individuals leading lives of relative comfort, who are nonetheless walking around in a semi-constant state of anxious misery.
Please understand that life is good.
Life is good.
Human life is good.
The world is good.
You are good.
Your life is good.
The people around you are good.
Your body is good.
If you look back on your life with any measure of perspective and clarity, you will see that the things that were a great source of stress and worry to you at earlier times were actually not all that important. The life issues that “stressed you out” in high school, or college, or early adulthood — you can perhaps look back and see that the amount of time you spent engaged in worry over your problems was blown far out of proportion.
The same thing is happening right now.
If you are worried about something, you are in a state of not enjoying your life. Can you see that as a child and teenager, without the worries imposed on you by parents and elders, you might have been very happy indeed, in your strong young body? This is true for you right now.
Consider the dying man in a disintegrating body, who might look at you with all your worries and doubts, and say, ” I would take that life. I would give anything to have that life.”
Your life is good. Wake up to this.
Take a good, long look at your worries. Put them into correct perspective. And live.