Ah Ha! What if you are surrounded by people who aren't exactly shining their little candles in the dark? So what? In fact, you will be surrounded by those people. And you will be hurt beyond all reason. And your feelings will ache. And it will be hard hard hard. To put it in the context of homeschool, how many times have I written that its impossible to shelter children from pain, even at home? A bunch of times, is how many.

And STILL I have to keep relearning this lesson. Your feelings aren't really what's important. Its your actions that matter. What you do, how you behave, what you have to give, how you treat people. How you make other people feel is what matters.

In other words: Do unto your neighbor, the Golden Rule, A Christmas Carol. Happiness all comes down to valuing other people's feelings more than your own by rising above selfish concerns to act well. A part of reality that could, if you weren't well taught in the first place, be difficult to understand. But its absolutely the way through this weird twisted strange world. Of course it is!

Our own feelings matter, they are guideposts meant to keep us from spending our lives surrounded by abusive people and other hungry predators. Our feelings are a conduit for intuition. And no one ever questions the good feelings. (Though, perhaps we should.) But not only is giving divine, its basically all we have over the yawning maw of pain in this world. That's how the light is spread, actually. Love is a verb and the only thing that really matters is how to give it away.