Keep yourself to yourself. Not quite in a god temper? Take a little time—count five-and twenty. Our souls are not our own. We convey a property in them to those with whom we associate; but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the tug, the agony, or our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over ourselves. A man of few words speaks few in vain. Frequently do we labor to secure the things that debase us into slaves, and overwhelm us with calamity. Weak men, who, meddling with things too high for them, do suddenly fall into distractions; which distractions do not only unman men, but they run upon desperate ventures to obtain they know not what. Is it meet to think that a little child should handle Goliath as David did? Or that there should be the strength of an ex in a wren? There is something almost pathetic in the humbleness of a young man’s strength before the object of his first true love. It is the abasement of the real before the ideal; but if the ideal fails, the real takes vengeance of the man for having trodden it under. The strength of a king is the love and friendship of his people. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything impossibly beautiful, strength has much to do with magic. It requires much personal strength, standing alone against the well-armed batteries of all one’s friends. We can see strength and not simply weakness. That means we emphasize the active quality of the left hemisphere, but in a way quite different from the exaggerated over intellectualization and overachievement drive that have so characterized it in the past. We work with the intentionality that is basic to every person. To cope enhances one’s ability to survive.

There are dormant and hidden assets in every person and within each situation, needing only some kiss of awareness to be awakened and made know. I am not strong enough to put the whole World right, however, even in our weaknesses, we are still strong. Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was but a grand presentiment. We know what masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. The World is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. We can see people in process and not simply as finished products. Each experienced event both constitutes the effect of a configuration from the past and acts as a cause for further configuration in the future. Development and change are more fundamental than stasis and completion. Expectancy, the investing in and waiting upon that which lies ahead, influences the meaning and the management of every present. We have been imbued with “the breath of life” and thereby cannot be active in “our” World. Even in our arrivals, we are still on our way. What power is able to hold in chains a mind ardent and determined? What power can cause that man to die, whose whole soul commands him to continue to live? In battles there ought to be a doubtful fight and desperate end; in pleading a difficult entrance and a diffused determination; in love a life without hope and a death without fear. When provoked, the gentlest spirits are the most determined. It is natural for people, when they set their hearts upon anything, to think everybody must see with their eyes. When the journey lieth forward, it is unwise to look back. We can see places of caring and not merely individual needing care. The setting in which people interact are alive. They influence what does and does not happen. They predispose what can and cannot happen in those circumstances. Healing arises from within the system of interaction.