Make Your Dwelling.

Occasions for sadness and grief are fleeting. All things are. Occasions for happiness and joy are fleeting.

Life itself is fleeting. We live between impacts. Blessings hit hard. Injuries hit hard as well. No matter how long you live, you will live only a very short time. Where do you choose to dwell?

It is your choice when you make your dwelling in the good, in the gifts and the gratitude, the lessons shared, the strength shared. It is your choice to dwell upon the things given.

It is your choice also when you dwell upon the things taken away, the injuries inflicted, the pain that lingers and can be fanned to flame, the disappointment and despair that grows so profusely, flowersome and weedful, with only just a little tending and attention. There's no doubt that life holds horrors. Horrible things come out of nowhere to crush, kill, destroy, to injure and flatten us. Let alone the fact that we all die.

Hopefully only children are not at peace with that fact - a given from the beginning? But where we survive, there are also things in life that strengthen us to cope with injury, and to thrive despite it. Your choice whether to dwell on and tend the things that grow and bring strength, that bring hope, is yours.

Hope doesn't found itself in dissatisfaction with what is. Our fervent wish that some specific thing must change, in order for us to call life good - this isn't hope. Hope flows from openness to all that is good in the world. Hope springs where we recognize how much good life has given. How much of it was unexpected! Good that came not based on any plan or demand of ours, but that nevertheless came. We all hold hard to certain desperate dreams, some expectation of specific change to come, some change bitterly wished for - and resented, the longer it takes. Yet what sort of hope flows from dissatisfaction with the world and with our inability to alter it? We hope desperately for some thing to change, but we hold out very little hope when we hold out desperate hope.

Hope's nature is not desperation, not dissatisfaction. It is openness to good. Hope is confidence in how much good life has to give - this is not vain confidence! It arises from all of the good we've seen, the good worked-for, the good given - the good that sprang from dumb luck and chance! Hope holds the heart open to any and all of it, ready to take it and make it flourish.

Life is short. If you wish to live in good, then dwell there.