I read the title of the email waiting in my Inbox:  $197 course given for free.

Free?  I hope it’s true. Or is it too good to be true?

I hesitate before clicking the link. A part of me is fearful clicking the link will inundate my Inbox with more messages about free courses on the secret to living the life of your dreams, on losing weight without lifting a finger, on curing some incurable disease just by focusing your mind on one idea.

I click.

I am curious. Which is what the title of the email was hoping to trigger, my curiosity.

I read the email and sigh. Yup. Too good to be true.

I delete it.

And continue on secretly hoping the next email truly will contain the secret to ever-lasting happiness, to uber health, to ultra living.

Hope lives eternal in promises to make the secret of life an easy-peasy elixir you only have to drink once to get a world of bounty.

It just ain’t that way.

Life by its very nature is complicated.

The secret to living it fully is to accept it’s neither complicated nor easy. Life just is what it is. Our job is to live each  moment without judging its difficulty or ease, celebrating in each moment without fearing there will not be a next.

At least, that’s what my mind told me this morning as I drifted in and out of meditative silence.

You don’t think about one heart beat flowing into the next, pausing in between each beat in fear there won’t be a next.

You don’t draw one breath in, exhale out, fearing where the next one will come from.

At least, not until you can’t, feel your heartbeat, breathe in the next breath, my mind whispered to me in the silence. Then, and only then, do you hope for another.

Hope is the silent breath that promises the next will come without fear.

Hope is the absence of fear.

Hope rides in on trust.

Fear erodes it.

I hoped this morning when I clicked that email that my spam filters would prevent any mishaps.

Fear, and perhaps a touch of past experience, said that wasn’t going to happen.

So, perhaps it wasn’t hope I was counting on. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking.

It can be easy to confuse the two. Hope lives in my heart. Wishful thinking in my denial of what is true.

I hope this makes sense. I’m letting the thoughts flow as effortlessly as my breath drawing in and out of my body.

I wish there was an easy answer.

To life. Love. Living.

Oh, my mind whispers. There is.

Live it for all your worth without fearing your worth, your value, your truth.  You are worth the world.

I hope that’s true.

I smile.

I know it is.

True. For everyone.