Eva’s Choice: Go For The Goodness

My daughter’s family had a rescue dog named Eva. She was a kind, gentle, loving, and very happy dog.

It would seem she must have had an easy and happy puppyhood, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, it was completely the opposite. It was hard, mean, and, by all appearances, cold and lonely.

However, Eva always went for the good instead of dwelling on her past.

That's why they chose her. She always chose goodness, despite all the reasons she could have been angry and bitter. She has increased her goodness ratio proportionality as she has lived with her new family.

I understand that many rescue dogs are like Eva. They go for goodness with all of their being.

We don’t appear to be as good as Eva at going for the goodness.

Instead, we allow our past to direct our present, which is then the architect of our future.

Even though we have so many more opportunities and abilities to choose goodness than a dog does, we don’t choose it. We dwell on past hurts, both true and perceived.

To add to the pain, we allow blame—not just to others but also to ourselves—to fester and grow.

Remaining in this victim viewpoint, to any degree, leaves us in the same situation that we are trying to forget or from which we wait to be rescued.

However, unlike a dog that has to hope and wait for rescue, we can rescue our own lives and stop waiting for someone else to do it.

In fact, we must rescue our own lives and not wait for others to do so because no one else can. No one can “fix” us because it is our own hanging onto a past picture of lack of love that must be resolved if we want to be more like Eva—kind, gentle, loving, and happy.

The question is, how do we do this?

Most of us have a part of our past, whether it was yesterday’s past or childhood pasts, which were painful. They weren’t fair. They weren’t kind, and they were not filled with joy.

How do we leave that memory? How do we forgive the players? How do we choose happiness instead?

Viktor Frankl wrote: “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. “

With the goal of love in mind, how can we not go for goodness?

As we rise to the awareness of Love’s everywhere presence in the turn of a flower petal, the shape of a leaf, the smile of a child, the dew on the grass, and the song of a bird, we dissolve the need to hold on to and reciprocate with anger through either passive or aggressive choices.

What use is there in not being forgiving? Can we see the stars when the Earth is shrouded in fog? Neither can we see the goodness within the fog of victimhood.

We all yearn for world peace. However, how can there be world peace without family peace? How can we wish for love to be known in everyone’s heart when we don’t know it in ours?

In order to forgive others and ourselves and reach for the awareness of infinite love, we must rescue ourselves from the false claim of victimhood.

We have to aim for a higher love.

The sad story is that most victims become abusers, sometimes physically and almost always emotionally, if only to themselves.

Perhaps it doesn’t seem as if we are being abusive when we say we have a right to be sad, lonely, and depressed. However, for the people who love us, it is hard to live with.

Sometimes, we are abusive by punishing the other person who we feel has abused us or other people who act like them or remind us of them.

And, even if none of this is true for you, in victimhood, we abuse ourselves.

Instead, we must remember that we exist to share, live, and love divine Love. Anything less than that means we are depriving ourselves of the infinite happiness that has been gifted to us as spiritual beings.

We can rise higher. We can rise above the claims that exist within the worldview picture and lift ourselves into the awareness and understanding that divine Love does not know abuse or lack.

Starting with this perfect sense of Love, we can make day-to-day choices that will begin to dissolve the pictures of abuse in all its forms, past, present, and future.

Let’s all make Eva’s choice and go for the goodness.

Let’s all choose to make a higher love the architect of our future and let the past bury the past.