Nobody cares. Love them anyway.

Are you having a bad day? Feeling miserable? Feeling like things aren’t going that well? Feeling like you’re not amounting to what you should, with creeping feelings of comparison emerging which set your most successful friends as your lowest benchmark? Are you having flashbacks of a lost love, or a harsh word spoken without constraint? Perhaps flashbacks to a cutting word you heard from someone you care about, a person you want to be loved by, simply for who you are? It’s a bad day today, isn’t it.

Well guess what. Nobody cares.

You are not the center of the universe. You are not the fulcrum around which the planet revolves. There are 8 billion people just like you. The planet cannot revolve around 8 billion fulcrums. It revolves around its own fulcrum. And you are not it.

No, instead, remember we are tiny organic specs of dust that by a miracle of biology, have an opportunity to ‘live’ on this rock whirling around a sun that is one of trillions of similar suns.

We are tiny. Your life is tiny. And that bad day you’re having, those unpleasant feelings, they’re embarrassingly tiny. They’re ‘a-spec-of-dust-on-the-whisker-of-an-ant’ tiny.

No one is coming to rescue you from your day or your feelings. No one cares. They can’t care. They’re too busy caring about their own feelings and their own day. They are too busy obsessing that their day is the most important. And so your day is small to them. It’s almost nonexistent.

What are you going to do? Pine over the injustice of it?

There is another way.

Forget expecting people to care, and care for them instead. Find the inner strength to address whatever up or down, high or low, that occurs within you. Recognize your entire existence is mostly a story you’ve made up in your head. If that story is badly constructed and it produces bad feelings, like an awkward scene from a well-meaning movie, that’s on you. It’s your responsibility. Not someone else’s.

So stop wanting them to make you feel better. Instead, make THEM feel better.

Love, even when you feel unloved. Forgive, even when you feel condemned. Sacrifice, even when betrayal is all around you. Give, even when everyone else is stealing. Support, even when you feel abandoned.

This is the mark of a King.

To do this, you must accept human frailty and brokenness. You must accept that people will steal from someone who gives them their second-last cent. Yes, some people will want to steal whatever is left. Accept it. It is the human condition. We are not all good, and never good always. We are sometimes good some of the time.

Accepting humanity is the mark of a King.

Find the inner well of resources. There is no need to speak words. Allow your actions to show your true orientation; you recognize the microscopic nature of us all, and you use your inner well to nourish others.

Letting go, giving everything. This is the mark of a King.

Do this and an environment of fertility will emerge around you. Others, some weaker of spirit than you, will find safety and nourishment in the environment you create. Your well, deep and endlessly flowing, will allow others to step into their goodness more, and more frequently. They will see your energy as an oasis in an otherwise difficult and dangerous world. They will make their best contribution to themselves and others from within your oasis. And that oasis will become a self-nourishing an self-reinforcing ecosystem, where the individual wells deepen and fill, as the collective one does.

Creating an oasis is the mark of a King.

The price to admission is steep. There is one person who will never achieve their nourishment from that oasis: the King himself. For every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The more fertile the ground, the more adversity will be offered to the King. Bigger and more complex problems, deeper disappointments, more terrifying risks, a growing community but inner isolation. The King cannot be nourished because as the oasis grows, so do the forces of harm that creep in to tear it down. This is why such oases are rare: they are unstable unless guarded by the most noble King. The fertility of the ground is proportional to the depth of his well. The second he attempts to earn a return on his ‘investment’, the idea that the oasis has something to repay him in return for its creation, is the very moment poison seeps into the soil and destroys everything.

Never desiring a payback. This is the mark of a King.

Now go ahead and compare these things to your small and miserable day. How does it feel now? Does the universe still revolve around you? Is it everyone’s fault that you are not happy today?

Take a deep breath. See it in perspective. And carry on.

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