Beloved, yes, you are responsible for your feelings and responses. They are yours. They belong to you. You carry them all in your backpack. No doubt, other factors may contribute to how you feel and respond, yet it is you who has to move forward. That is, it is you who has to grow from here.

This isn’t to say that everything in life is absolutely an individual’s own doing. If a friend of yours is arrested for a crime he is innocent of, then you do not shrug your shoulders and slough off your friend’s remote possibility of guilt under the canopy of karma.

What can be said, however, is that if a bee bites you, now the bee bite and its aftermath are yours to deal with. After all, you are the one bitten. You may rightfully ask for an apology or reprieve from the bee or the world at large or from good God and not receive it. This, then, is also yours to deal with.

Easy? Not at all. Fair? Doesn't seem so. Yes, the possibility exists that you can miraculously be rescued from out of the blue. This too can happen. It has happened.

Of course, you might demand this with all your heart – and a lot of good this demand does for you.

It is the same when you have an illness. No one has the right to say you earned it. Of course, you yearn for a cure, yet it’s also true that no matter how unfair or rude it may be that this illness exists and that you have this temporary illness, you may hold onto it. By the same token, there is no guarantee that you WON’T have a spontaneous cure. Someone has had a spontaneous cure.

Life indeed is spontaneous. Such a thing as destiny also plays a part. In any case, what can you do in life but go on from where you are? At some point, it’s essential that you stop stamping your feet on the pavement or beating your fists on your chest.

Yes, your situation may take courage and resolution. Nevertheless, courage and triumph have arisen from nowhere where courage and triumph could have been expected and arise and lead to great growth of character. Courage and triumph of character are worth acknowledging.

It’s not helpful for you to hear someone tell you to make the best of a situation. This just isn’t good enough. This is too dim. To grin and bear it doesn’t exactly inspire anyone. In fact, there is a sense in which grin and bear it pulls you down.

From great difficulty, great blossoming may arise. Good has come from the impossible. Grow. Keep growing.

Consider your forebears. Many lives have been lived that no one would choose, and from many of these lives, you may well have arisen. You yourself may well have been one of your ancestor’s reasons for triumph, and one of your forebears may well have cried out that from your very existence alone, all the inhumanity he went through, your very existence makes it all worthwhile.

May gratefulness for you, your very Self, strengthen you to the point that you never complain about anything ever again, for what do you have to complain about really?