As we know, once sadness, pain, or anxiety lands on us and the micro pains begin to manifest across our literal perceptions so that we can rub off and appear negative, or disturbed by something, and look withdrawn or isolated socially and even privately, for that matter, there comes a certain conscious distance between our understandings. This distance is forged as we decide to sit and spend more time in this eventful arrival of something that feels like it has landed upon us. In these instances, the world begins to withdraw from its usual coloring; lights, sounds, and natural sights we are very familiar with become fuzzy and lose their static beauty. This doesn't only fall into painful occurrences—it is actually the same when we are sick. Notice how when you find yourself ill, bright colors and normal tasks become more difficult and challenging?

Obviously, we are dealing with a certain marriage between our perception and our internal livelihood.

When we perhaps feel grief or depression, the whole world immediately becomes grey; colors lose their brightness, the body feels heavy, and we are prone to sit in the pain because that is all there is to do, simply because it covers every other usual conscious experience and requires constant attention. In these moments, it is much easier to close our eyes and shelter ourselves away from interacting with the world, and over the course of our so-called 'healing' process, we must move forward in a manner that tames this sudden pain we are forced to confront whilst simultaneously navigating the world we previously navigated with a stronger and more subtle passion.

This is a fundamental truth in moving out from the pain and into something new; it is an act of the phoenix—the bird sets itself on fire to be reborn again eternally. We, too, are identical with this bird; the world will always bring us to experience pain, and then we are tasked with overcoming it, striving out, and returning back into an acknowledged position of functioning human life.

Back into our natural condition.

Yet, I would like to provide you with a certain rule of thumb for these times that are objectively waiting for us in the future.

When you find yourself at odds and in-between a distance with who you previously were before the negativity set in and now the person you are with the painful affair you must confront in the new world that you inhabit, you must acknowledge your appearance to both yourself and those around you.

Listen to these words.

It is an inescapable law that you must be in pain around others, meaning, you cannot permanently hide your suffering despite your attempts; it will ultimately be seen. Though you try hard to not show it to those around you, for the sake of being professional, for the duty you have to protect from burdening your loved ones, it is in these moments that what I have discussed about being withdrawn and perhaps isolated spiritually from the social world, that your eyes may turn to the ground, and you may breathe slower, and your body is becoming heavy and therefore you must retreat into certain slow and sloth-like body positions because the pain is sedating. It is in these moments that you can, in the very present moment, find some peace and reduction in the pain by seeking the beauty that never disappears—only that it has just been hidden. By the power of focusing your attention on little meaningless things that which, beforehand when you were thriving, you perhaps noticed their significance only slightly.

If you are truly disfigured and amongst others, slow everything down. Do not engage in conversation but reverse the direction of your attention; it is an instinctual thing to socialize and talk when around others, but perhaps if you are truly in pain in this moment you must not speak. Instead, you must look on to the room; the material objects have an appearance and a reality, they are a color, they are a shape, they are a presence in the room, or wherever it may be, they are all around you and calling on your childlike essence to interact with them.

The pain you feel demands that you slow yourself down. The term "gloomy" gives us a slow interpretation; it feels lazy and dreamy. You must become the nature of the pain and allow it to direct you.

If you are driving and find yourself suffering and you are also in traffic during the night, notice the bright lights on the car in front of you; look into them and slow your attention down. Just simply take part in looking at the lights with no words or meaning to your action.

See the truth, that you in this moment are with other people in the same act, and you have no idea if they are in the same world you are in. You are all taking part in the same thing; yours may be different, but there is always beauty and always ugliness to look at. This creates a dual understanding of things. If you are too broken to listen to music, then this is even a stronger time for the present moment to occur more spectacularly than before. You are in dialogue with complete attention and your true experience, without the presence of words or thoughts.

Silence.

It is easy to focus on the pain in a rational sense and describe it and even analyze it, and this is also the thing that escalates the pain’s popularity across your perception. Instead, if you stare into the lights from this, you will begin to hear more things; if you wind your window down, you may hear the soul of the street, the nighttime life of the road is present with you, and you have many options before you that not only complement the sadness you feel but make it more romantically charged. Therefore there is no negativity with the pain you feel; it is now a melancholic, wondrous experience. One which is inspiring. From gazing into the lights and the soul of the road, you are actively seeking something beyond you, and as an old truth, that which is outside us can and always move us in one form or another. Trying to control it is unnecessary because you are the thing that moves.

If you are shaking in anxiety and riddled with panic and you go to the toilet to hide from the people at work, in those moments you must accept that it hurts, and then stare at perhaps a dirty floor or the grey cubicle door. Once your eyes are fixated on the colors that perhaps match your feelings, this moment is where you have just entered into the present state of things, and therefore you can continue observing the shape of the door, the choice of color, the physical nature of it, or perhaps even the strange designs of modern life. All of which have given you perhaps several seconds of presence and preoccupied your attention away from the chaos of inner chatter and worry.

In these moments, you must embody the idea that you can die in any moment from now, and there is nothing you can do. Imagine when you are about to die, and it is totally out of your control. What options do you have? You can gaze at the electric sensations of the colors or state and environment. You do not begin to panic; you are accepting of your finite insufficiency and simply act with embracing the final moments.

On some level, we are always deceiving ourselves for the sake of not being a certain thing over another thing. Death threatens us all; we must at all times keep it with us, using the mortal codes as measurement on our possibilities to evolve, and live, to create and to observe. Death destroys all of these things as we believe it does. It is the ultimate gift presented to us, and it happens after a life has been completed. In-between birth and death, we are simply experiencing many things at once. Our biological goal is to reach death eventually, and so, if that be the end, then everything in between must be lived with total wonder that is happening to us.

"I have lost my lover to cancer" — This is devastating to the core and will destroy parts of us, and yet once we reach a state where we say we are no longer in the true agony of what we were once in when this news was so ripe and raw, that moment we are no longer in it, and we can smile and live again, the pain never goes but we have overcome just a micro part of it and therefore we must be proud and honor the very fact that we have lost someone we would move worlds for.

"I have been horrifically abused by a stranger" — Horrific. Yet, this crippling suffering that has happened to us will eventually become a mark for us to approach relationships in a new way that now forbids this ever happening again and it extends our worldly view about the possibility of evil people. Yet, again, an infleunce and change has been produced. It may be classed negatively but it is still a new possibility of living differently from a new evolution.

"I have lost my mother" — This is a tragedy, yet, it offers new things of use. Losing someone so meaningful to you beyond relationships, rather that the mother is a biological necessity on your beginning life, will shatter your soul. Yet, when one no longer has a mother, one must stand before the world and look into it unsettled, disfigured, and aware of the pain that awaits them. What does this do? Life develops a new surface; a richer, more horrifying side to the world’s reality unfolds. New options present themselves to the individual regardless if they are suffering in this or if they are secure despite the agony. We always have a hour to celebrate the chaos of the world.

The reality is, all pain we feel in the present moment has with it multiple options which we can explore, and, for that matter, all of which are always fresh and new despite being familiar with everything beforehand. By the age of eighteen, you understand pretty much everything in terms of what roads look like, streetlights, the sounds of the world, the weather, differences between cities and villages, old people and children, you understand it all. And in these moments, pain does not take any of it away; it simply colors it all in different ways, and these things all have within them a certain psychological value—they are modes of information being transmitted to us.

Remember that in agony, the world remains the same; your pain does not contribute to it or change it in any way. Therefore, we must accept this law and find within the world’s appearance the messages of its functionality. Paying attention to these things will reduce the agony. It is not about sharing things with people when you are truly suffering, and so you must use your eyesight and embrace the horizon of possibilities that await you.

For new lives are right in our reach.