Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with £86,400. Every evening whatever part of the balance you fail to use during the day is deleted. What would you do? Draw out every cent and use it well, of course!!! Each of us has such a bank – Its name is TIME. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Invest the day’s deposits well, or the loss is yours. How could you bring the most contentment, happiness and benefit to yourself and others? The clock is running.

It can take us to great heights and leave us feeling light and airy. Yet it has been the most abused and misused force. Many degraded things pass for love. True love is based on understanding, mutual trust and respect and not simply on transient emotions. Love is being in balance, that is, in harmony with the self, God and each other. Love dwells in the soul. We must allow this love to flow out and around us. Without love, all of life’s treasures are locked away from our vision and experiences, for indeed ‘Love is the key.’

The ability to enjoy one’s own company is one of the greatest gifts life has to offer. Learning to turn my thoughts away from all my responsibilities at the day’s end and take my mind into a state of peace and benevolence enables me to carry greater and greater loads without feeling the burden. When my inner landscape is full of beautiful thoughts, everything I do is a pleasure. Gently, I calm down chaotic situations and offer solace to troubled minds.

Even if I don’t mean to be critical, I often unconsciously focus on others’ weaknesses and mistakes. The more I develop the habit of noticing goodness and only holding on to the good in others and in situations, the more my own sense of well-being will rise. When I continually think: ‘He/She is wrong’, I create a barrier that prevents me from reaching my own goodness.

There is a silence into which the world cannot intrude. There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost. There is a love you have missed for so long and will always come back to.

If my mind is still enough, I can see the deeper meaning behind each situation. No matter how bad a problem may seem on the surface, if I remain positive eventually I will see how everything has worked out for the best.

When the past is mixed into the present, it prevents you from experiencing the happiness the present offers. So the question is how do you forget the past? Focus your attention on that which is good in the present. Do not compare the present to the past.

What goes around comes around is not a new insight. It is something most of us intuitively know but easily forget, as we attempt to hold on to most things which come to us. What we don’t realise is the ripple effect can easily become the cripple effect. Everything we think and do not only ripples out into the world, it also creates an impression on our own consciousness inside. If one day you decide to get really angry (very unrelaxing) at someone, then you create a memory of your irritation and carve a kind of scar or groove on your consciousness (non-physical of course). Within this scar or groove is a recording of the image of the person as you have decided to perceive them, and the energy of your anger surrounding that image. Remember, you put it there, not them. Two days later you see the same person and that triggers the image and the anger which you have already recorded within. The emotional turbulence inside your consciousness makes it very hard for you to remain positive, connect and communicate effectively, positively and harmoniously with them. In effect you are crippled and clouded by your own emotion. Most of us experience this, sometimes many times a day, but refuse to see that we cripple ourselves, preferring to blame the other person. Which is why we can stay crippled for a long time and not even realise it.

They say ‘only fools live to the full’. Because only fools go where most of us fear to go, only fools do what many of us spend our lives avoiding. You don’t have to climb Mount Everest, or cross the world in a hot air balloon to live to the full. Simply enter each day with a commitment not to avoid anything or anybody who comes your way. Then your Everests will come to you, in the form of difficult people and challenging situations, and the only thing you will need to conquer is our own fear and evasions. And when you do conquer, you will know that you have lived fully, for there is nothing more exhilarating than overcoming our own obstacles which, if the truth were known, are always only in our own minds. When you turn to face these inner obstacles and challenges some people call this real courage and you certainly are no fool.