James: Health issues aren’t healing.
Hi James,
You made a nice list to justify why you feel despondent. However, this is a feeling reaction, so could be, or not be, a fact.
What is an undeniable fact is mortality – everybody dies sooner or later. To feel bad about it would be wasting your precious moment of being alive while you are alive. So even if your health is not improving this is no valid reason to mourn your death before it happens. Only some months ago you wrote –
James: As I approach the end of my life I decided to look at my regrets and then I realized that I don’t have any. I consider this a good thing and due to actualism. (24 June 2025).
When you realise (again) that you are ‘your’ feelings and your feeling are ‘you’, you can choose, at any time, to be a more enjoyable feeling. Why waste your most precious asset, your time, by feeling miserable, for whatever reason?
James: The ex is gone.
Ah, the other side of love, the bitter-sweet memories you wanted to “burn […] out” because you “know this feeling doesn’t last”. Now you mourn that it hasn’t lasted. A salient demonstration how fickle one’s feelings are.
James: Af seems unlikely.
Yes, particular when you are in a glum and gloomy mood. But then you have had a lot experience of successfully enjoying and appreciating being alive – which is not an actual freedom but nevertheless enjoyable in the meantime. So why not get back to feeling good as soon as you can and enjoy those last precious days, months, years of being alive?
James: Nothing and no hope is left. Maybe this is how it needs to be. (link)
I don’t know about “nothing” but “hope” is certainly a feeling useful to abandon.
Richard: Please, whatever you do with me, throw faith, belief, trust and hope right out of the window … along with doubt, disbelief, distrust and despair. (Richard, List B, No. 11, 22 Mar 1998)
Richard: Hope, the antidote to despair, is what most people live on. Living in hope – having faith or trusting – is a poor substitute for the living purity of the perfection of the actual. Hope sets one up for disappointment time and again … and all it is, is the antidote for despair. All trusting, believing, hoping and having faith and certitude are but the antidotes to distrust, disbelief, despair, doubt or suspicion. (…)
And look for passion … the passionate involvement required to maintain the synthetic credibility of whatever is believed in, or what one has faith in, or what one trusts and what one hopes for or has certitude about. It is impossible to dispassionately believe, dispassionately have faith, dispassionately trust or dispassionately have hope or certitude. Anyone who claims otherwise does not understand the experiential reality lying under those words.
I am consistently urging not only the discarding of all beliefs, but to examine and discard the very action of believing itself. (Richard, AF List, No. 14, 3 Mar 1999).
There is nothing which “needs to be” in a certain way. It is up to you how you want to experience this moment of being alive. But if the above quote makes sense to you and you understand that hope only invites disappointment and despondency, you can give it up voluntarily because this simply makes sense.
Then you can begin to appreciate what is actually happening and pay fascinated attention to what is happening in this moment – without expectation that it should be otherwise. It is so delightful to be here in this moment where you are actually alive.
Richard: Okay. It is essential for success to grasp the fact that this is your only moment of being alive. The past, although it did happen, is not actual now. The future, though it will happen, is not actual now. Only now is actual. Yesterday’s happiness does not mean a thing if one is miserable now … and a hoped-for happiness tomorrow is to but waste this moment of being alive in waiting. All you get by waiting is more waiting.
Thus any ‘change’ can only happen now. (Richard, List B, No. 19, 17 Mar 1998a)
In regards to you saying “maybe this is how it needs to be” you might find this informative –
Respondent: Why am I afraid of ending the conflict?
Richard: Is it that up until now conflict has been ‘my’ raison d’être? Is it that ‘I’ have invested so much into it that it has become ‘my’ very identity? The reason is not all that important … what is important is:
Just do it.
Respondent: I will have to relinquish all of my hopes, dreams, desires, yes?
Richard: In order to enable that which is vastly superior to all your ‘hopes, dreams, desires’? Yes … willingly, cheerfully.
Respondent: All of my cherished pains, self-pity, causes, no?
Richard: All these and more are what ‘I’ am made up of … these cherished things are ‘me’.
Respondent: And I have a market mentality. I want to know what I will get in exchange. I am quite bamboozled … what to do?
Richard: There is no problem about a ‘market mentality’ whatsoever … ‘sacrifice’ means an altruistic offering, a philanthropic contribution, a generous gift, a charitable donation, a magnanimous present; to devote and give over one’s being as a humane gratuity, an open-handed endowment, a munificent bequest, a kind-hearted benefaction. A sacrifice is the relinquishment of something valued or desired for the sake of something more important or worthy … it is the deliberate abandonment, relinquishment, forfeiture or loss for the sake of something illustrious, brilliant, extraordinary and excellent. It means to forgo, quit, vacate, discontinue, stop, cease or immolate so that one’s guerdon is to be able to be unrepressed, unconstrained, unselfconscious, uninhibited, unrestrained, unrestricted, uncontrolled, uncurbed, unchecked, unbridled, candid, outspoken, spontaneous, relaxed, informal, open, free and easy.
As I have remarked before, ‘I’ go out in a blaze of glory. (Richard, List B, No. 25f, 19 Jun 2000)
Cheers Vineeto