My role as a helper is not to do things for the person I am trying to help, but to be things; not to try to control and change this person's actions, but through understanding and awareness, to change my reactions. I will change my negatives to positives; fear to faith; contempt for what this person does to respect for this person's potential; hostility to understanding, and manipulation or overprotectiveness to release with love: not trying to make this person fit a standard or image, but giving this person an opportunity to pursue their own destiny, regardless of what their choices might be.
I will change my dominance to encouragement; panic to serenity; the inertia of despair to the energy of my own personal growth; and self-justification to self-understanding.
Self pity blocks effective action. The more I indulge in it, the more I feel the answer to my problems is a change in others and in society, not in myself, which disempowers everyone.
When I waste my energy mulling over the past with regret, or considering ways to deal with a future I have hallucinated, I become exhausted. Projecting an image of the future and anxiously hovering over it, for fear that it will or will not manifest uses all of my energy and leaves me unable to live today, yet living today is the only way to have a life.
I will have no thought for the future actions of others, neither expecting them to be better or worse as time goes on, for in such expectations, I am pretending I actually have control, which is insane. I will love and let be.
All people are constantly changing. If I try to judge them, I do so only on what I know of them, failing to realize there is so much I do not know. I will give others credit for attempts at progress and for having had many victories which are unknown.
I, too, am always changing, and I can make that change a constructive one, if I am willing. I can change myself. Others, I can only love.