Morning Trip (327)

“One of the basic problems in close relationships is the tendency to expect the other person to be and act the person you want them to be. It takes considerable maturity to allow the other to live his or her own life. You may have certain needs that you hope your friend or lover or family member will fulfill. You may live by certain rules and habits that you hope everyone will adopt. You may have a worldview that works for you, and you can’t understand why someone closer to you doesn’t share it. This clinging to self-interests has to change. You may have to learn to appreciate and ultimately enjoy the other person’s ways and especially the mysteries that lead them on.

Allowing the other his or her own life and destiny is a spiritual achievement, a religious act, if you will, that raises the relationship above the level of mere human connection.”

–Thomas Moore, A Religion of One’s Own, quote encountered on the Perpetual Journal dated 8.25.14 of Rosemary Washington Chapter Two

Morning Trip (104)

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e. e. cummings