October 27

Affirmative mode

Think of how you can center more of your time and awareness around what’s good in your life. Seek to direct more thoughts and energy toward all you love and treasure.

Let past joyful moments continue to resonate through your life long after they happen. Enhance the present with your commitment to working toward positive experiences for yourself and others.

Choose thoughts, habits, and activities that get you living life in the affirmative mode. Accept and deal with reality as it is, and then work to bend that reality in beneficial ways.

An orientation toward victimhood, excuses, and complaints can poison your awareness and impair your efforts. Instead, continue to point your thoughts toward improvement, achievement, understanding, and positive purpose.

What you carry in your head and in your heart has great influence on the way your life unfolds. Make the decision, day after day, to embed the best thoughts and expectations within yourself.

Position yourself to create the most rewarding outcomes. Go through life in the affirmative mode.

— Ralph Marston

October 28

It all matters

What you’re doing today will make a difference. Be sure it’s the kind of difference you desire.

The choices you make right now, and an hour from now, will have an impact. Choose in such a way that the impact is a positive one.

What you do, what you neglect, what you finish, what you put off until later, it all matters. Your thoughts, your words, your habits, feelings and efforts all contribute to the substance of your life.

Everything about the way you live matters. It provides you with a powerful opportunity that always continues to unfold.

You can make use of your wisdom and experience to gain even more wisdom and experience. Then you’re able to apply all that to living with intention, adding much richness to your world.

There’s much you can do with life, much you can do about life. Pay attention, choose wisely, and give your best, because it all matters.

— Ralph Marston

October 29

This imperfect moment

The day didn’t work out the way you hoped. Perhaps you can enjoy it anyway.

It’s good to make plans and see those plans through to fruition. Even so, you’re free to create new goodness from whatever happens, even if it’s unplanned and unexpected.

No matter how you got here, this moment is yours to live at the highest level of fulfillment. Regardless of what you have or don’t have, you have the opportunity to make the best of today.

Allow thankfulness for that opportunity to fill your heart. Then look around, notice the good you can do, the richness you can experience, and do so.

See the great potential in this imperfect moment. Step away from your judgments and delight in the experience.

Things are not like you expected. Now is your chance to make them even better.

— Ralph Marston

October 30

Upgrading your choices

You cannot be everything, and would not want to be. The life you actually live is the life you choose, so choose with care, and love.

The wondrous mental, physical, and spiritual power of your being is always pointed in some specific direction based on your choice. Each choice excludes all other choices, and builds upon choices that have come before.

With your choices you make sense of the chaos and complexity that would otherwise engulf and devour you. Your choices create specific value and give meaning to time and place, to objects, motions, and experiences.

Countless forces beyond your control exert great influence upon your life. Even so, your own choices are what largely determine how you deal with and experience whatever comes your way.

If some small thing or some big thing is not going well for you, there are choices you can make to improve the situation. Though they may not be immediately obvious or easy to implement, with thoughtfulness and persistence you can uncover them and act on them.

What choice right now would make the future a little bit better? Keep asking that, and answering it, upgrading your choices and doing the best you can.

— Ralph Marston

October 31

Love and courage

Don’t be reckless, but don’t cower in fear either. Be careful, yet not so careful that you fail to live your life.

The world has always been filled with danger and it will continue to be. You’re smart enough and capable enough to navigate the dangers and still enjoy great fulfillment.

Some risks are foolish and others are well worth taking. Get clear about what you intend, and you’ll learn as you go what risks are appropriate for you.

Recognize your fears and pay attention to what they tell you. At the same time, don’t allow fear to immobilize you.

The courage to act in the face of fear is well within your reach. Summon that courage by reminding yourself of what you must do to support and nurture all you love and care about.

With purpose and intention, you can handle the fear. And with love and courage, live your life.

— Ralph Marston

That reading deserved one big gigantic amen:1: