Making things more important than they are is one way the ego keeps us out of the present moment. This is particularly apparent when something truly important happens, like when you or someone close to you nearly dies or goes through some other crisis. This puts the other things the ego magnifies in importance into perspective. The ego doesn’t have perspective, which is one reason we suffer when we are identified with it. Its perspective is narrow: To it, life is good when we’re getting what it wants and bad when we aren’t. The trouble is that the ego’s desires aren’t a good guide for what’s important in life or for what will make us happy. And the ego often overlooks what might really make us happy, such as taking some time to just be, to connect with loved ones, or to do something fun or creative. The ego tends to drive us to achieve, improve ourselves, and get more things, and while there is a place for all of this, focusing exclusively on what the ego wants can leave us feeling empty, disconnected from life, exhausted, and never having or being enough.

Many people have a hard time believing that God is good when they don’t feel that life is good. How can God be good when life isn’t experienced as good, when it is experienced as painful? What they don’t see is that although life is essentially good, it is possible to experience it as painful because we are programmed with beliefs that cause us to experience pain. This doesn’t make life, itself, painful, even though it has the potential to feel that way. This challenge—that life can feel painful—is built into life, but we are here to discover that we create that pain by how we think about life, and that pain isn’t inherent in life.

You are just here for the time being. In the grander scheme, this lifetime and all your lifetimes on earth are a blink in time. Most of your experiences as explorers and expressions of this manifestation of the One are joyous and filled with immense delight and wondrous discovery and service to others. The Oneness that you are manifests as human on earth to explore challenge and limitation, but by no means is this the experience in other realities and dimensions. That you think things should be different and you wish they would be is understandable and natural. Who wouldn’t want ease over struggle, and happiness over unhappiness? But one of the lessons you are here to learn is that your circumstances don’t have to change for you to be happy or for struggle to cease. Once you learn this lesson, you are free of the conditions on earth, and you won’t be returning.