When you start to understand the inside-out nature of our experience of life, relationships get a whole lot easier.

You start to see that you’re creating your own experience with your thinking and that your thinking changes as often and as capriciously as the weather. You become skeptical of your own thoughts, about yourself, about others, about your partner.

It becomes second nature to disregard those insecure and judgmental thoughts that spring up unbidden when you’re tired when you haven’t made time for those long runs you love, or when they just do for no reason at all.

They no longer mean much of anything. They’re just transient, ever-changing, and usually profoundly unhelpful.

The real magic unfolds when you look away from thought altogether and find out that the stuff that’s actually real, the stuff you can count on, comes from a different part of you entirely.

There is so much hopelessness and despair in these strange times.

Young people are looking ahead to a future that looks bleak, seemingly stripped of opportunities and possibility. Older people have been deprived of time with their children and grandchildren, living in constant worry about contracting Covid. And then there are the parents, especially parents of young children, trapped at home, having to wear so many hats, with precious few opportunities to take a breath and find a quiet moment of ease.

Hope seems to be in short supply. And so we’re invited to ask the question: Where do we look for hope?

If you get only one thing from this article let it be this: We need to look for hope inside, not outside, of ourselves.