… but hold people accountable. No matter if you are subscribed to any of the religious confection of pre-prepared groupings or hold dear and true a completely unique view on spirituality, choose to see God in all people and all things. This does not have to be any form of an anthropomorphized entity or defined deity, energy or notion. This God can represent beauty, kindness, balance, order amidst chaos, hope…

We’re all held together by a few cornerstones and come as a mixture of good and bad and drugs of choice. You could be extremely compassionate, kind and loving and self-righteous and bossy at the same time, you could be put together mostly bad with a few redeeming qualities overshadowing and overpowering the darkness or any imaginable combination gained through nature, nurture and personal growth or lack of it. But there is God and wonder in everything that constitutes a life. You may even choose to view life force itself as this God and life gets better if you decide to be a conscious seeker, observer and appreciator of grace and effort.

This is not a naive stance or some hippiesque easy way out to not have to deal with the difficult and challenging, raw and unsightly aspects of people, because seeing God and beauty in all does not relieve them from accountability for their actions, it is by no means a free pass to dissregard duties, obligations and the effort of trying their best – whatever their best at that moment or situation may be. You don’t get to decide what that ”best” is for anyone but yourself. You don’t have the authority to decide that for them, but you do have authority over yourself to decide how you’ll view the world around you.

Keep the childlike wonder alive. When you were young you saw everything as a miracle as you were experiencing it for the first time. This hasn’t changed, things are still a miracle, a bit of order in a volatile universe. Magic is still alive and magical and you’d be surprised how much more you get from every experience if you enter with good intentions, presuming that others are doing the same as well. Anger and resentment are impotent if you don’t judge. Even when things go extremely wrong never judge the person. Take the situation as an isolated event and hold them accountable for the action not their personality. They are not excused from keeping promises and boundaries matter. Set them with love and appreciation for yourself an others.