Start the Day 5 Think about: what makes your heart sing

Another way to start the day is to decide not to take yourself seriously today. There is a difference between respecting and intently living your experience, and getting bogged down in pressures and expectations that you have made unnecessarily important. Anxieties, concerns, self-imposed challenges and behind them all, the ongoing insecurity and guilt that are never far below the surface jollities - and those too, the endless succession of empty amusements and trivialities - become exhausting, because they do not nourish or remind us of what we really are and what love is.

So what's this? Catch yourself starting the day with a sigh or a growl, and consider: do you want to add another burden to your already burdened mind (T14 II 1)? As long as you are striving to live a good life (in the sense of conscientious) or the good life (in the sense of pleasurable), or striving to escape a bad life in either sense, your striving in itself looks to some other time than this. Happiness can only be now. Be not content with future happiness. It has no meaning, and is not your just reward. For you have cause for freedom now (T26 VIII 9).

Students of A Course in Miracles - that hefty, concentrated text, profound, baffling, poetic, uncompromisingly religious in language and imagery - sometimes forget what it is about. It is profoundly serious, but its message is light:

• Be happy, for your only function here is happiness W102 5

• Today we will attempt to understand joy is our function here. If you are sad, your part is unfulfilled, and all the world is thus deprived of joy, along with you (W100 6)

• To heal is to make happy...think how many opportunities you have had to gladden yourself, and how many you have refused... (T5 intr 2)

• ..the function of relationships (is) forever "to make happy." And nothing else (T17 IV 1)

The problem is (the Course tells us), we have learned such contradictory lessons about who we are and what we love and what we are entitled to, that we have to unlearn what we believe we want before we can relearn how to be happy.  I must learn to recognize what makes me happy, if I would find happiness (W83).

The Course is not however among those who carol that the world is wonderful. The message is not that you should be upbeat, positive, appreciating what you can and downplaying the sadness and the disappointments. It is not that you should reframe pain as experience or failures as necessary steps to success; not that you should cheer up, count your blessings and your (small, short-lived) mercies and look on the bright side. The idea is not to hug your advantages and be grateful when the disadvantages happen to someone else.

When the Course talks about happiness, it means the happiness of a freedom of mind that nothing in the world can give. We believe that people, places, things, events have the power to make us feel happy - or something on a scale between happy and unhappy - so we seek them out or avoid them, proving ourselves right. But when you realize the mind works the other way round: that first we choose to be happy or not, and then we see our choice reflected back to us by the people and situations we encounter, then you are released forever from helplessness. The world you see is yourself, a construction within the mind; like a dream, it seems outside, and as when you are dreaming, you seem to be walking about in it. But you, the dreamwalker, and everything around you are part of the dream.

To really get this is what the Course calls the 'happy dream'. Even if only occasionally, in lucid moments, you experience that synchronicity of outside and inside, when your inward thoughts are mirrored in events around you, when you recognize that your state of mind is being played out in your physical experience; or when you are so much 'in the flow' or inspired - in spirit, as the Course puts it - that you forget yourself, you become so much a part of the moment that you hardly know if you are making it up or you are being made up at the same time.

How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not there? (T6 II 6)

At the start of the day, you may not have time to muse on such existential principles. Out there are things to be done, responsibilities to honour, the ever-creeping forces of dissolution to counter, and people to share the day with. Whatever your apparent circumstances, however, you might briefly ask yourself: What if I decide not to suffer? What if happiness wells up in me for no special reason, even despite a host of reasons why not? What if I let it carry me through the day?

A flicker of joy across your mind lets everyone off the hook, demonstrates that you are not a victim, dispels any grudge against anyone...witnesses to the eternal truth that you cannot be hurt, and points beyond itself to both your innocence and his. Show this unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love T27 I 5

What makes your heart sing? The particular moments and things that make you happy are only reminders, symbols, cues, different for everybody. But happiness is the same for everyone. The only reason to be happy when you start the day is not because the day's prospects are good or bad, but because there is something unquenchable in you and you will feel lighter and stronger to remember it.

Some years ago I knew a little girl who made up this chant to sing:
Love is the place to be
It's where you enjoy yourself.
Love is the place to be
It's where you've always been.

Where you enjoy yourself is the place to be. And it is in you, not somewhere else.