Free The Age of Miracles by Marianne Williamson

what your doctor says, no matter what the establishment says—there is hope. It’s tempting to feel at times that you blew it in the past and there’s nothing you can do to redeem yourself. Or that the cruelty of the world defeated you and you can’t rise back up. But the miracle of midlife is that nothing that happened before this moment has any bearing on what’s possible now, except that what you learned from it can be fuel for a magnificent future.
    Miracles are available in any moment when we bring the best of ourselves forward. It isn’t the amount of our years that will determine the life we live now, but the amount of our love. Our future isn’t determined by anything that happened 20 years ago, 30 years ago, or even 10 minutes ago. It’s determined by who we are and what we think, right here, right now, in this moment. Almost every hour of every day, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where we can be now who we weren’t before, because we know now what we didn’t know before. And from this newness in our being springs fresh opportunities we could never have imagined. God specializes in new beginnings.
    I had an experience once that depressed me greatly. I felt wounded by something in my past and fairly hopeless about my future. Around that time, I moved into a house on the water, where I had a view of the sunrise each day that was more gorgeous than anything I had ever seen. Every morning’s sky looked like a Japanese woodcut that had come to life, with black branches slowly turning deep green, ebony sky turning hot pink on top of the branches, and a beautiful bright turquoise below. I had never experienced nature as such a deeply spiritual thing before. It was so extraordinary. I felt for sure that I’d been led to that house, and to that bedroom view, as part of my healing.
    Every day my eyes would automatically open as the sun began to rise. I’d lie there and not just look at the dawn; the dawn would enter me. The imprint of sunrise—of a new day following the darkness of night—made its way into my cells. And one morning it was as though I heard the voice of God, telling me as I witnessed the dawn that “Such is the work I will do within you.” I too would experience a new dawn after the dark night of my soul. God would give me a new beginning. I knew it then. And as I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep, I thanked Him with all my heart. And my heart was healed.
    I ’M OFTEN AMAZED WHEN WATCHING Olympic ice-skaters.Someone who has practiced something thousands, literally thousands, of times, gets in front of a worldwide TV audience in the most important competition of their lives, and makes a fall that could ruin all their dreams in one split second. How many of us would just completely fall apart at that point? But not them. They keep going. They’ve got another triple axel to do 1.2 seconds later. They simply cannot allow their future to be determined by the past. And that’s not just a physical skill. It’s an emotional skill, a psychological skill. It’s a skill that anyone who wants to make a passage into a prosperous, creative, and exciting second half of life needs to develop.
    It’s not simply that “what’s past is past.” It’s bigger, somehow holier than that. It’s that what has happened until now was a set of lessons—often extraordinary, often painful. Yet all that was ever going on was that you were being given the chance to become the person you’re capable of being. Some lessons you passed, and some you failed and will have to take again. Some you enjoyed, and some you resisted and might have hated. But they’ve left you—if you choose—a better person, a more humble person, a more available person, a more vulnerable person, a wiser person, a more noble person. And from that, all things are possible. A youthful body is wonderful, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be when you’re not who you should be. And once you are, the cracks in your body can