The more softly the rain falls, the more deeply it soaks in. Deeds that fall softly strike deep. Hard deeds raise welts that swell up and change colour — full of pain and of poison that time then has to heal again, softly, in silence. The abnormality of welts and swellings in our emotions, where pain takes longer to drain than it does on a limb, makes of us all patients who need a doctor of the spirit.

To cherish your heart is to keep your spiritual expenses low. To do that, you have to prevent too many people, and especially the wrong people, from walking across your heart. Lead them, even mischievously, off on a wandering path around your heart rather than through it. Sometimes thoughts too have feet rather than wings, and they also trample their tracks into your heart and pack the ground down hard. The chances of a good harvest grow thinner the more we lay our hearts open to everyone. Our hearts are holy ground, because out of them are the wellsprings of life — our life. Love happens there, forgiveness happens there, joy, revenge, indifference and discontent — in other words, life in abundance is smothered there, and everything that ends in death is kindled there.

A failed harvest in our heart means no fruit to pick in our personality. It means joys are shared and pain is multiplied. That is algebra that does not sound logical, although the answer is right. Mathematics is not only the language of the firmament. Mathematics is the paper our disposition and our motives write every day, to be marked just before we fall asleep. Because soft words and sensitive expressions carry a larger answer, you need not be clever to score full marks.

Just be soaked through with tenderness.

Full of grace for others and full of understanding for situations. To be human in the way an animal is that tears its prey only when it is food. Predators are in the right, cannibals in the wrong.

How do you escape a surrounding drained in a love of self, of pleasure, of comfort and of money? You pull the plug out of your own heart so that everything contaminated with self-centredness drains away. With your own greater freedom of movement you can begin to make a difference.

Greet instead of not-greeting. Smile instead of holding your expressionless pose. Make eye contact instead of looking past. Take an interest instead of hurrying yourself off with an excuse. Identify instead of sympathising. Stand by with deed rather than advice. Hold, touch, and look in order to truly see. Give people and situations your prayers instead of your opinions. Reach out with your heart and with your time instead of with your wallet or with nicely chosen words. We are one another's keepers and one another's doctors.

This is not psychology, this is mathematics.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer