There are to ways of spreading light:
to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
The best way to help yourself is to make sure you help others. It doesn’t matter what you help them with, as long as you help them in the first place. Help them in small things and help them in big things. Sometimes you may just want to listen without getting involved.
I think this is a universal law. The more you give, the more the universe smiles and gives back. It’s not karma. You can’t expect or invest in yourself by helping others, but somehow, mysteriously, if you just focus on making the world a better place, someone will notice and make sure that you’re doing well yourself.
The best way is to be the candle. To be and to do. To shine a light, especially in the deepest loneliness darkness.
But it is just as good to be a mirror.
You can lend a hand in someone else’s cause. You might not be able to save your own marriage, but you might be able to help and save someone else’s. You can hold your mirror to a person’s life and let them see themselves like they otherwise would not. We need mirrors. We get stuck on ourselves and shape the world the way we want to see it, but the world and our reality can be shaped and reshaped. When other people show us who we really are, the give us a gift that outweighs the treasury departments of any wealthy country.
Be a candle or be a mirror, but above everything else, always find a way to spread the the light. There are forces at work, and people at work too that want the light to die. They want the darkness to overwhelm us and want our hearts to descend into the depths of hell. But this is not hell. It is far from it. Life is an amazing opportunity to be human and make the world more divinely human too.
Be a light. Shine brightly.
Be a mirror. Reflect the light of others, brighter still.
