The Force that Feeds You

One of my early influences growing up was the writer James Baldwin, who I thought and still think was eloquent and wise. In conversation with the poet Nikki Giovanni, a conversation that was later published as a short book, which I still have, he said:

It isn't even a question of keeping yourself happy. It's a question of keeping yourself in some kind of clear relationship, more or less, to the force that feeds you. Some days you're happy, some days you ain't.

For me, Kadampa Buddhism is the force that feeds me.
And the part about not being happy some days makes me think of the part of How to Solve Our Human Problems where Geshe Kelsang says:

Normally our need to escape from unpleasant feelings is so urgent that we do not give ourself the time to discover where these feelings are actually coming from. ... Unfortunately, by reacting so quickly, we do not give ourself the time to see what is actually going on in our mind. In reality, the painful feelings that arise on such occasions are not intolerable. They are only feelings, a few moments of bad weather in the mind, with no power to cause us any lasting harm. There is no need to take them so seriously. We are just one person among countless living beings, and a few moments of unpleasant feeling arising in the mind of just one person is no great catastrophe.
Just as there is room in the sky for a thunderstorm, there is room in the vast space of our mind for a few painful feelings. And just as a storm has no power to destroy the sky, unpleasant feelings have no power to destroy our mind. When painful feelings arise in our mind, there is no need to panic — we can patiently accept them, experience them, and investigate their nature and where they come from.

 Boy, I wish I had learned that a long time ago.