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(Below is an excerpt from page 10:)

Have you ever taken the bitter pill?

There is a big difference between the inevitable pain in life and optional bitterness about life.

Emotional pain is specific and localized to particular events, while bitterness generalizes pain, changing our overall opinion about life.

We can take as big a bitter pill as we want.

We can dislike all men, or women, or ethnic groups, or bosses, or police, or people in suits, or rich people, or poor people.

If we decide to make it even bigger, we can dislike life, the entire world, or God.

Such bitterness takes pain and weaves it throughout one’s world.

As a result, the course of many people’s lives travels from blind-eyed optimism to blind-eyed pessimism.

Why would someone decide to broadcast wider than necessary the expectation of pain?

It makes some sense as a (futile) attempt to protect us from further hurt.

Yet, it is a big mistake, because it becomes self-fulfilling, bringing us more hurt.

When we begin to expect only pain, our guarded attitudes bring pain to others, even those who mean well toward us.

In AA, they express this phenomenon as “Hurt people hurt people.”

When we hurt others, prompting their own defenses, they often hurt us back, proving our worries to be true.

The other way that bitterness is self-fulfilling is that we will miss the opportunity to be loved and healed, thinking such redemptive experiences to be non-existent.

Fortunately, we have better alternatives.

One solution is to keep our eyes open for the diverse variety among people as well as the dual mix of selfish and loving urges in most everyone.

You can prove the first part of this (the variety) to yourself, gradually, by focusing careful attention on the world around you.

You can prove the second part of this (the duality) to yourself immediately.

Just look at yourself.

Notice the evidence of the mix of giving and taking in yourself and how elusive the balance between them can be.

For example, have you ever failed in your attempt to rise above a selfish concern?

On the other hand, if you did not have love to give and potential to express, then you would not be disappointed when stifled from expressing it.

Of course, after being hurt, you become cautious.

So, does everyone else.

That means that other people are also afraid of you.

In this reciprocal fear lies a hint to your own power to begin making the world safer for love.

Healing the world, one loving moment at a time, is much better than being bitter.