Building A Fort

Sadness or what is called depression is a condition. A condition apart from the medically treated kind, is not truly cured by outside substances or methods that are actually mere bandaids from a bottle or a bag. Most normal personal conditions are something we can control on our own. What causes them usually can't be fixed, thus the condition. Taking it back a step, since we own the condition, we may find a way to build a "fort" against it. Everyone has a favorite method of making that fort. To get through conditions, I call on my imagination. My imagination is powerful. Everyone has one, and it can be made more powerful with practice. You, as I, will find where your imagination can take you in building your fort against depression or sadness. Sometimes it's a place or people or things, but it's always somewhere that makes you feel good. When you get there, you may see the ones you loved or the setting you wanted. You can shut the door and stay there for a happiness time. It's often called "daydreaming"and maligned by teachers, but it's a pleasant occupation in the right places. It is not the classic meditation which asks one to think of nothing. And while that works for some, it doesn't for me. In my imagination, I go to a place that is absolutely mine. It's peaceful in its solitude. There is music that can't be written or played and colours that are impossible to describe, but while there in that fantastically beautiful place, everything else goes away and I am in perfect happiness. In my imagination, I often go to meet the people who died and when I am with them, we smile and talk and feel the warmth of our previous times, renewed. I have an active imagination space, too. Sometimes during this place, my "thinking time", I imagine what I can cook or sew or decorate or write. Everyone has a "thinking time" during the day or night. Mine is early morning when I first awaken and before I arise. It is dark and quiet and rested, the perfect place to watch ideas form and grow. The ideas don't always take root but they seem not to need fruition. They simply float about aimlessly and that's okay. Behind the fort that denies the bad news, the unpleasant tasks ahead, or some other invader of  private thoughts, one can make it an art, not a pain. Your fort, the one that keeps out negative things, works if you let it. You are in control. They are your thoughts. What they are, belongs to you and you can use them to make your own place of goodness and beauty and truth.