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Consider that every story is told. :)

Consider next that every story is lived. All things are experience; all things are experienced, from within and without.

"It would be amazing if xyz! If she/he/they/it/x made it! If it happened! If it worked! If it stayed or connected or landed or signed!"

Gently, now — if and as you can, we ask you to keep what feels useful and calming and balming, and leave the rest aside. No need to force anything down. :)

The experience of time is that of your singular point of focus moving between configurations of reflection. With each perceptible instant, you move from one world to another. Like frames on a filmstrip, the motion blurs together, and it feels continuous. It works. The laws you derive and collect and test are reflections of the calculus by which the next world is chosen. It is a stunningly beautiful system.

(By the same token, your observation of your own thoughts in sequence, each one in passing, adds up to your experience of thought. It is less that you are engaged in the process of thinking, and more that you are observing thoughts as they co-occur with you, frame to frame.)

Every possible configuration of existence is explored and experienced. The futures you imagine are each as real as the now you experience in this moment, here with these words.

The goodness that you yearn for, for the sake of others, is done and achieved and reached and experienced and fully, vividly realized. The only reason you may not find it on this current course of time, is that it is not compatible with your own course of time.

Gently, gently. This does not mean that your choices grant or deny good for another. This means only that the experience of others reflected to you is itself a reflection of your own position and posture in this life. You experience the fulfillment of others to the extent that your experience is compatible with their fulfillment. You experience nothing that you don't let in.

Your mechanism of control, for what you let in and what you do not, is you. And you are comprised of so many things! And not only do you contain constituent parts, you are a constituent part of things beyond you as well. Directly, and indirectly too: there are ways in which you are implied into being as well.

We're having a little dance with Isaac here. He's trying not to talk about things like "vibration". He cares so deeply about making a work that is as soft and accessible as he-we can manage. :)

So we'll work backwards from there: your mechanism of control is you, in all the ways that you are comprised. The composition of you is not something you can enumerate and manage, piece by piece, which means that your axis of control is something simpler: for this vast assembled machination that is you, there is a single lever available for your manual control. It is your alignment with yourself. :) It's as if the grand complexity of your you-ness is at every moment emitting a musical sound that requires one more note for it to be satisfyingly complete, and your job is to choose that sound with the single lever available to you.

But it's easier than that, once you see it: it's as if you've walked up to a table with a ten-thousand-piece puzzle on it, fully assembled except for one piece, and it's your job to put that final piece into place.

But it's more forgiving than that: no matter your choice, the construct of you plays on. The music continues. The puzzle will still add up to a functional image, no matter what piece you force into place. The filmstrip of time always has another frame. Each moment of dissonance and each strangely-fitting puzzle piece is creation in motion, for you are choosing into existence a path of time that you could not have reached had you not chosen as you did. You are an explorer, and the only lever you have for your journey is that of ease.

We say "ease" here instead of "alignment with yourself". They add up to the same thing, and the two terms each cast a useful light onto the object. With them both in place, we can see the thing more clearly.

The lever of alignment-with-self can be seen as the lever of ease once you're seated in a comfortable position relative to the lever. If you sit facing away from the lever, such that you operate it by reaching behind yourself, without even letting yourself see it, then it won't feel particularly like ease. You can still manipulate the lever, of course, and work out its optimal position based on the rumblings of the you-machine beneath, but the process feels awkward, contorted. Only once you turn to face the lever, from a position where it fits naturally into your hand, where your body is well-positioned to muscle it into movement, does it begin to feel like ease.

All of this is to say that the process of tuning one's self-alignment becomes simple only when you situate your view of the world relative to that lever. It is the simplest viable perspective for living. It works. There are other perspectives that work, certainly, but every last one of them is more complex and more difficult to manage. Your time spent living in them is well worth it, beloved; you waste nothing with your time there. This is an adventure, an education, a research mission of sorts: you may do whatever you choose. Every choice leads to more experience. That's the most fundamental principle. It cannot be otherwise. You are perfectly safe, in the most fundamental of ways.

And — gently now, gently now — if you are ready for ease, you have space to wonder about turning around to face that lever of yours. Your current posture is one that you chose for excellent, excellent reasons: the care you have for others, the futures you're aiming for, and on and on. They all count. They will all continue to count. As you turn to face yourself, as you turn to get a comfortable handle on the only mechanism of control you truly have, that is your own alignment with yourself, you will be in a position to contribute to every single one of those cares with ease.

It will all come to pass. It all matters. It's all real. And, there are unending variations of the real. To gain more skillful control of your navigation makes you a greater contributor to the experience of all. Also, it hurts less. ;)

You are seen, you are adored, and you are helped. Take what is useful, leave the rest. You are safe, you are held. There is no urgency here; you have all the time you want or need. Rest in this, and adapt with the consideration of all of this only as it feels like relief. This isn't a matter to be forced. It is a matter to be relaxed into, and that by degrees. We describe not only an opportunity but also the periodic destiny of all consciousness: all things cycle through alignment and misalignment, continually, eternally. This is the definition of vibration. ;)