Life is good. Not because your life is hunky-dory, completely free of immediate stressors or anticipated future causes for anxiety.

Not because your soul is ensconced in cosy security, sans spiritual uncertainties or existential crises.

Not because you’ve got everything sussed out: that there is God (so everything is taken care of, as long as you toe the divine line and act in total submission to Providence) or there is no God (which means the perceived free will is real and unbounded, and is there for you to wield at will, thereby giving you absolute freedom); that, in the former case, the God who created us and the universe we call home is the Ultimate Creator of the Omniverse, not a mere downstream scion of the Source, or this God of ours is an affable, personable, accessible, benevolent, temperamental, imperfect, occasionally funny and oftentimes incompetent embodiment of higher intelligence just one rung above us on the cosmic ladder of evolution, whose pet exclamation is…“Oopsie”.

Not because you’ve finally figured out, to your own satisfaction, how the soul segues from one life into another in a way that is akin to how Olympian gods, or the archetypes represented thereby, gain eternal life by manifesting themselves, ad infinitum, in individual as well as collective identities throughout human history.

Not because you are in love or you no longer concern yourself with matters of the heart so you shall never again agonise in the bittersweet syrupy morass of emotional entanglement.

Not because you’ve just won the lottery or your weekly dabblings in the game of luck continue to tantalise and bring with it that indescribable, not unpleasant sensation of hopes hoisted and hopes crashed on a scale as small as the amount you invest.

Not because it’s sunny today or you’ve risen above the effects of weather on your mood.

It is because of none of those things that life is good.

Life is good because life is the only thing you have. Life has to be good.

If it is not good, make it good.