The Creed

By no means will all of this prove useful to you, but some very well might. Take whatever will serve you and dismiss the rest.

Regret has stolen enough time from you, do not humour it by indulging in recrimination or self hate, and do not think that some period of guilt-ridden penance-of-sorts will resolve anything. I don't care what you've done wrong nor who you've hurt through your carelessness or callousness; you don't have time to dwell on it. Learn what lesson is pertinent from the misdeed in question, make amends or set things right if possible and leave it at that. Each day brings you closer to your death and regret will steal those days from you if you let it.

Do not underestimate the value of your own pleasures and pastimes; life is hard, it is wretchedly hard for a plethora of reasons for each person and whatever personal diversion helps to make each day more tolerable, or even provides a moment of distraction from the current troubles, should not be dismissed. They are not petty, they are not childish, they serve your interests as much as food does.

Where emotions fail you, decisions must succeed. Specifically, if you are overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness or inadequacy, you must choose to disregard it and take steps to deal with whatever caused such pestiferous feelings in the first place. If you feel the temptations of laziness or procrastination (and if it's far too improvidential to heed them) you must choose to do what you're tempted to avoid.

One day the Earth will be gone, so too the sun, so too the milky way galaxy; every trace of your existence shall be erased from a creation whose origin and mysteries may very well never be revealed to you after death; everything you do shall be as if it never was. With that in mind, everything you do becomes the amazing struggle of a valorous lunatic against a force so mighty as to be inconceivable.

Learn at least one thing from the following subjects every three days:

A personal story of another
A fact of the known workings of the universe
A fact of the known workings of the brain or body.
A new experience you could potentially have.

It's better to know the stories of others, the physical rules of reality and how your mind operates than it is to be ignorant. You won't know what comfort, inspiration, fascination and opportunities can be found unless you seek them out.

Learn to revile inactivity; whenever you feel yourself stubbornly refusing to do something, even some form of procrastination, and languishing in inactivity, spare a moment for irritation and then force yourself to do what you should be doing. Similarly, learn to scorn any sense that you are incapable of achieving any goal or fulfilling any desire. Life is not unconquerable and a lack of self belief no more reflects your actual potential than a half-remembered nightmare reflects your mental state. These reactions must be reflexive, do not try to convince yourself of their rightness or applicability. They're small, easily manageable acts which will help you, it's as simple as that.

Record anything pertinent to your own mental well-being, any fact, any undertaking, any means to achieve a positive state of mind, anything and everything which helps you in any way, write it down, for the tools of positivity are so easily forgot whilst negativity, conversely, is effortless.

Be ready to contend with yourself should your mind attempt to reject an undertaking. Once a task is begun, it becomes easier to handle, yet the true struggle is typically in the commencement.

Do not allow depression or the voices in your mind proclaiming your worthlessness to go unchallenged; by no means expect to overcome them in any given situation by force of will or distraction, but to deny the effect they would have on you, to any degree, is to hold on to a sense of your own worth or, put another way, to not give up on yourself in the face of the seductively dark conviction of dejection.

Beware the voice that tells you you're worthy, you're beautiful, you're loved, you're not beyond hope etc. for it is the herald of a voice from within ready to offer cynicism in the face of sentiments so easily dismissed and aggravating, which then suggest your own negativity is the truth. Which one's lying? If it's the praising voice, why would anyone seek to uplift one so craven as the discouraging voice insists? Why would they care about such a fallen creature unless you're not so far gone as you thought? If it's the discouraging voice, why should its false words sting you so? If it's both, or neither, then you've found the middle ground where the truth, for lack of a better word, tends to reside.

How often have you been wrong? What dreadful certainty which has plagued your waking moments day after day eventually turned out to be a mere shadow of the horror or tedium or aggravation that you had all but accepted as fact? Remember those times, there shall always be another such moment on the horizon.

The beauty of the world does not require untroubled times to appreciate, and it can prove a potent comfort for the wretched, persistent day to day stresses, if you let it.