1. Be Impeccable With Your Word;

2. Don’t Take Anything Personally;

3. Don’t Make Assumptions;

4. Always Give Your Best.

Agreement 1: Be Impeccable With Your Word

Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

‘Impeccability means “without sin.” Impeccable comes from the Latin pecatus, which means “sin.” The im in impeccable means “without,” so impeccable means “without sin.”’

Your intent is created through your word. Your words have the power to destroy or to create. When we say a person is under a ‘spell’, it is caused by the words that have made them believe or accept a new agreement—often these are negative.

‘We use the word to curse, to blame, to find guilt, to destroy. Of course, we also use it in the right way, but not too often. Mostly we use the word to spread our personal poison-to express anger, jealousy, envy, and hate.’

Gossip is particularly bad for everyone involved, and not just the target of the gossiping. We have the power to ruin someone’s day in a sentence and hurt ourselves horribly at the same time.

‘Your opinion is nothing but your point of view. It is not necessarily true. Your opinion comes from your your own beliefs, ego, and your own dream.’

If you are impeccable with your word, it becomes a shield against the negative words of others.

Agreement 2: Don’t Take Anything Personally

Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

‘Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.”’

Things that others say and do is nothing to do with you. It is about them.

When we take things personally, we take offence. When we take offence, we defend ourselves. When we defend ourselves, we create conflict. When we create conflict, we inflict harm. On ourselves and on others.

‘Do not expect people to tell the truth because they also lie to themselves. You have to trust yourself and choose to believe or not to believe what someone says to you.’

When we say ‘don’t take things personally’, we mean this in both positive and negative terms. Don’t take anything personally, even compliments. This can work against us, too.

‘Whatever people do, feel, think, or don’t take say, it personally. If they tell you how wonderful you are, they are not saying that because of you. You know you are wonderful. It is not necessary to believe other people who tell you that you are wonderful.’

Even your own opinions about yourself aren’t necessarily true. Don’t take them personally, either. When we take things personally, we suffer a lot. not doing so gives us immunity to all sorts of things.

‘If you keep this agreement, you can travel around the world with your heart completely open and no one can hurt you. You can say, “I love you,” without fear of being ridiculed or rejected. You can ask for what you need. You can say yes, or you can you say no whatever choose, without guilt or self-judgment.’

Agreement 3: Don’t Make Assumptions

Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

The central problem with assumptions is that we believe them to be true, when they likely aren’t. We then gossip on this basis, and we create difficulties.

‘Making assumptions in our relationships is really asking for problems. Often we make the assumption that our partners know what we think and that we don’t have to say what we want. We assume they are going to do what we want, because they know us so well. If they don’t do what we assume they should do, we feel so hurt and say, “You should have known.”’

We make assumptions in all kinds of circumstances: when we hear; when we don’t hear; when we understand; and when we don’t understand.

The way to stop making assumptions is to ask questions, and plenty of them, until you actually know.

‘We also make assumptions about ourselves, and this creates a lot of inner conflict. “I think I am able to do this.” You make this assumption, for instance, then you discover aren’t able to do it. You overestimate or underestimate yourself because you haven’t taken the time to ask yourself questions and to answer them. Perhaps you need to gather more facts about a particular situation. Or maybe you need to stop lying to yourself about what you truly want.’

Agreement 4: Always Do Your Best

Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.

‘If you try too hard to do more than your best, you will spend more energy than is needed and in the end your best will not be enough.’

Your ‘best’ always changes from one moment to the next. if you always do your best, though, there is no way that you can feasibly judge yourself. If you do less than your best, though, you will subject yourself to guilt and growing self judgment.

‘Action is about living fully. Inaction is the way that we deny life. Inaction is sitting in front of the television every day for you are afraid to be alive and to take the risk of expressing what years because you are. Expressing what you are is taking action.’

Take joy in the things that you do without any expectation of any kind of your reward. This is truly doing your best.

‘Not enjoying what is happening right now is living in the past and being only half alive. This leads to self pity, suffering, and tears.’

Doing your best also means taking action in the present, in the here and now. If you don’t, you can’t really live.

‘If you break an agreement, begin again tomorrow, and again the next day. It will be difficult at first, but each day will become easier and easier.’

Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, Oh, Soul, where you belong.

Stay in the dark limbs of negroes. Stay in the body of the prostitute. Stay in the sick flesh of the syphilitic. Stay in the marsh where the calamus grows. Stay there, Soul, where you belong.

The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above’. Not even ‘within’. The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within’. It is a wayfarer down the open road.

Not by meditating. Not by fasting. Not by exploring heaven after heaven, inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics. Not by exaltation. Not by ecstasy. Not by any of these ways does the soul come into her own.

Only by taking the open road.

Not through charity. Not through sacrifice. Not even through love. Not through good works. Not through these does the soul accomplish herself.

Only through the journey down the open road.

The journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal. Always the open road.

Excerpt from Studies in Classic American Literature, by D.H. Lawrence, first published in 1923.

by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ever to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend,—and forthwith troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress and the dinner,—but the throbbing of the heart and the communications of the soul, no more.

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish,—all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,—a possession for all time. Nor is Nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard,—poetry without stop,—hymn, ode and epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these too separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison of misused wine” of the affections. A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is his,—his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments,—fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a universal success, even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity,—thee also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love:—

DEAR FRIEND,

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable, and I respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how many friends I have and what content I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum:—

“The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.”

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank; that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting—as indeed he could not help doing—for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility,—requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle,—but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says,—”I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted.” I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighborhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet on the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

No two men but being left alone with each other enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other, will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,—no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which, beneath these disparities, unites them.

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own before we can be another’s. There is at least this satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb;—you can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos inquinat, aequat. To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until in their dialogue each stands for the whole world.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent,—so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late,—very late,—we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire,—but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world,—those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely.

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel if we will the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ‘Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.’ Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other’s because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced; he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover before me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions; not with yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them not what they have but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.

There is a central piece of us that makes decisions. And every time we make a decision, or have an experience, we turn that core piece of ourselves into something slightly more elevated or something more degraded. And if we make disciplined choices, we slowly engrave a certain set of habits and dispositions inside that core piece. If we make fragmented decisions, we make that core piece a little degraded. And when I look at people with character, what they have is consistency over time. Things that lead us astray are short term like lust, greed or hunger. The things that are character are long term like honesty and courage. Those people are consistent and can be counted upon over time, because they have something solid engraved.

These are the people who have built a strong inner character, who have achieved a certain depth. In these people, at the end of this struggle, the climb to success has surrendered to the struggle to deepen the soul. After a life of seeking balance, Adam I bows down before Adam II. These are the people we are looking for.

Excerpt from The Road to Character, David Brooks

Societal success is a common answer. Yet societal success without coherence leads to a sense of emptiness and burnout. Spiritual fulfilment is another. Yet, in spirituality too, a lack of coherence can leave us feeling lost, disconnected, even depressed. What is this elusive coherence, then?

At its essence, coherence means alignment — when the parts of a system work together in harmony.

In human terms, coherence arises when the mind, body, heart, and actions are in sync.

In societal terms, it appears when our life, values, abilities, and relationships support one another.

And in aware terms, coherence means our food, body, breath, and mind practices maintain our state well, in a conscious, intentional manner.

We’re never avoiding life’s vicissitudes, rarely indulging for too long in it’s decadent pleasures. Rather, coherence means meeting the reality in front of us with our best effort at truth, engaging with what’s within us proactively, and expanding our relationship to both.

Biologically, a coherent state shows up as smooth, rhythmic heart rate variability (HRV). The autonomic nervous system comes naturally into equilibrium; sleep becomes restful; reactivity softens. The heart sends clear, harmonious signals to the brain, improving emotional regulation, intuition, and cognitive performance. Disease seldom finds the roots inside to take meaningful hold. In essence, coherence brings the entire system into harmony — a measurable bioenergetic alignment between all inner parts.

Psychologically, coherence means living in integrity — when your values align with your choices, and your emotions support rather than sabotage your goals. You can feel fully without losing center, respond rather than react, and hold life’s experiences with clarity.

When coherence is missing, we experience stress, confusion, and inner conflict — like an orchestra whose instruments are out of tune. When we cultivate coherence, inner peace becomes our natural state of being. There’s no inner war. The internal noise quiets. You move through life with clarity and ease.

Coherence is what it means to come home.

To a place where you are safe, comfortable, and fully yourself. Both within, and without.

It’s the partner whose touch and gaze and simple presence helps you unfold into who you truly are.

The friends who are dependable, who share in joys together yet never shy away from knowing just the right way to lift you when you’re down (or knock you down a notch if you’re too high!).

The work that draws out your best, where your eyes sparkle daily to be and do and serve a purpose you believe in.

When you’re in a coherent state, synchronicities often cluster. You’ll notice you “just happen” to be in the right place; goals unfold without forcing; dreams, songs, numbers, or people reflect your inner process; an intuitive sense of what to do next arises, without overthinking. These are not random gifts. They’re a quiet sort of miracle, evidence from the universe that your inner world and outer world are in dialogue.

To live coherently is to live connected — to yourself, to others, and to the deeper rhythm of life itself. And at the very center of a coherent life, is a life lived through the heart first.

To heal is to let the wound breathe again and rejoin the flow of life. We come into balance through interaction, with ourselves, with others, with the living world, and these interactions are reciprocal. They require that we give and receive, reveal and witness, expose and hold. Vulnerability, in this sense, is not weakness but the language through which balance is restored. No one is whole alone. The story of an enlightened Buddha and Jesus as Christ, are just that, stories: entertaining and uplifting for the spirit to hear, yet not entirely grounded in reality. Just as ecosystems require diversity to thrive, our emotional and spiritual ecosystems require others to mirror and complete us. Healing happens when we risk being seen and touched by another, whether human, animal, or the earth itself, rather than retreating into the illusion of self-sufficiency that technology and wealth give us.

Consider, for instance, the simple yet profound exchange between an adult and a child. A child, by nature, meets the world in naked vulnerability. It is wide-eyed, curious, and unguarded. They rely on us, and yet, those who spend time with children often speak of feeling healed by their presence. The child’s openness dissolves our defences, their laughter clears the static in our minds, their trust calls forth the tenderness we have long buried beneath competence or cynicism. This interaction is not one-sided, in fact it is a loop of healing. We protect and guide the child, yes, yet in doing so, we are woken up to our own capacity for innocence, for play, for love without transaction. The vulnerability of the child invites our own, and in that mutual exposure, something essential is restored. This is what genuine healing looks like: a shared unfolding and dance of mutual becoming. Healing happens in the spaces where control softens and receptivity deepens. Such encounters recalibrate us; they return us to the living pulse beneath the noise.

Perhaps, beneath it all, there is a deeper rhythm, something the rational mind cannot quite grasp, though the heart recognises instantly. The universe, in its quiet intelligence, seems to know what is right for us in the unfolding of who we are and where we are intended to go. That is, intended to go both through our own conscious volition and that of an energy we cannot fully comprehend. When we come to perceive the wholeness of our experience in this way, we notice that the people who enter our lives often arrive through alignment, rather than randomness or beneficial transaction. There will be sparks of elation, and moments of challenge where we want to walk away. We might notice they mirror us in just the ways we need. Some stay, some leave, yet all arrive with purpose, carrying fragments of our balance and growth in the woven thread they bring into our experience. If we meet them with openness, honesty and commitment, whether in friendship, love, or work, we step into a larger choreography that extends far beyond our understanding.

Yet this is not how the modern world typically approaches healing. The instinct today is to reach outward, toward what can be measured, managed, and controlled. We place trust in the institution of the hospital, the religion of the prescription medication, the specialist, the retreat, the therapist. We look for visible interventions and statistically reliable outcomes, for something to diagnose, treat, optimise, or resolve. These approaches can be valuable, and at times they are necessary. But they also reflect a deeper cultural faith that healing is something done to us from the outside. In this frame, the unseen dimensions of healing are repressed and neglected.

When the breath is steady and rhythmic. When the food and drink we take into our bodies are natural and aligned with what the body, mind, and spirit are truly asking for in that moment. When the body is largely free of tension, pain, and toxins. When the mind is clear, alert, and at peace. Something begins to change. We begin to notice that these external patches, the human invented ways for dealing with ill-health, begin to matter far less. We start to experience firsthand the natural order of life and of our own being, along with its inherent capacity to self-regulate again and again, unless we continue, willfully and egoically, to interfere with that harmony through the limits of our imperfect knowledge.

Truly, there is poetry in how life arranges its healing and evolution:
how a stranger’s kindness arrives on the day you lose faith,
how a conflict cracks open the very place that needed light,
how a friendship deepens precisely when you stop pretending to be fine.
The universe, it seems, is always conspiring for our integration,
weaving threads between souls that do not yet know they are part of the same tapestry.
When we let ourselves trust this design,
healing and growth cease to feel like achievements and become a participation in wonder.

In this sense, healing is often something deeper than what we think we need; it answers what our spirit is yearning for, a call that the universe is always listening to. It is in trusting this, that we can truly begin to embrace what comes next on our path. We consciously give our energy toward that which is of the spirit, and give that which is of the ego a time to rest.

In contrast, the modern world has grown suspicious of this surrender to the spirit. The cultural script rewards self-sufficiency, performance, and the careful maintenance of ego-based persona masks. We curate identities and interactions to protect ourselves from being seen too clearly and too deeply. Everything becomes transactional: our labor, our affection, even our wellness. We consume experiences and products promising to “heal” us, but these offerings often perpetuate the very fragmentation they claim to mend.

The pharmaceutical pill, the therapy, the quick-fix retreat, all of these can serve a purpose, and sometimes they do bring relief. But when healing becomes mechanical, it ceases to be relational. The pill may balance one neurotransmitter, but it cannot teach us to feel safe in another’s arms. The therapy may reduce anxiety scores, but it cannot replace surrender to the warmth of a gaze that says, “you’re not alone.” In neglecting the human and ecological webs we belong to, such interventions risk deepening our imbalance. They resolve one symptom while ignoring the deeper fracture: our separation from our selves and from life itself.

True healing, then, asks for a different orientation. It asks that we lay down our masks, that we honour our interdependence, that we allow the world to move through us. It invites us to remember that our wounds are not private afflictions to be hidden or “fixed,” but openings through which connection enters. When we are willing to be vulnerable, we offer others permission to do the same. When we receive another’s pain without trying to solve it, we affirm the wholeness that already exists beneath their suffering.

Healing is not a destination, it is not something we achieve; it is an ecology. It thrives on reciprocity, honesty, and awareness. Both of our own selves, and the world around su. It moves through conversation, touch, presence, and forgiveness. It hums in the space between a parent and child, between friends who have learned to listen, between strangers who meet and recognise themselves in one another, and between the layers of skin that are our own bodies. It is, ultimately, the restoration of balance, within us, between us, and throughout the living world that sustains us.

And perhaps this is what nature has been whispering all along. Balance is achieved as much through surrender as through strength, as much within and without. The most potent medicine is found not in control of the outside world, but in communion between it. Healing is the art of remembering that we were never meant to be whole alone. We are healed, into our essential state, in the wholehearted presence of each other.

Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.

Excerpt from Island, by Aldous Huxley.

I’m here with you young men today because your parents wanted me to speak to you about service—that is, serving others and giving back to the broader community for the blessings that you have received in your life. But that is a speech for a later time in your life. Don’t get me wrong, serving others is really, really important. It truly is the secret to happiness in life. I swear to God. Money won’t do it. Fame won’t do it. Nor will sex, drugs, homeruns or high achievement. But now I am getting preachy.

Today, I want to talk to you about the dirtiest word that any of you 9th graders know. It’s a word that is so terrible that your parents won’t talk about it; your teachers won’t talk about it; and you certainly don’t ever want to dwell on it. But this is a preparatory school, and you need to be prepared to deal with this phenomenon because you will experience it. That is a guarantee. Every single one of you will experience it not once but multiple times, and every adult in this room has had to deal with this in its many forms and manifestations. It’s the “F” word.

FAILURE. Failure that is so mortifying and so devastating that it makes you try to become invisible. It makes you want to hide your face, your soul, your being from everyone else because of the shame. Trust me, boys—if you haven’t already tasted that, you will. I am sure most of you here already have. AND IT IS HARD. I know this firsthand, but I also know that failure was a key element to my life’s journey.

My first real failure was in 1966 in the 6th grade. I played on our basketball team, and I was the smallest and youngest kid on the team. It was the last game of the season and I was the only player on the squad that had not scored a point all season. So in the second half the coach directed all the kids to throw me the ball when I went in, and for me to shoot so that I would score. The problem was that Coach Clark said it loud enough that every person in the stands could hear it as well as every member of the opposing team. Going into the fourth quarter, our team was well ahead, Coach Clark inserted me and thus, began the worst eight minutes of my life up until that point. Every time I got the ball, the entire other team would rush towards me, and on top of that, that afternoon I was the greatest brick layer the world had ever seen. The game ended. I had missed five shots, and the other team erupted in jubilation that I had not scored. I ran out of the gym as fast as I could only to bump into two of the opposing team’s players who proceeded to laugh and tease and ridicule me. I cried and hid in the bathroom. Well, that passed, and I kept trying team sports, but I was just too small to really compete. So in the 10th grade, I took up boxing where suddenly everyone was my size and weight. I nearly won the Memphis Golden Gloves my senior year in high school and did win the collegiate championship when I was 19. Standing in the middle of that ring and getting that trophy, I still remember looking around for those two little kids who had run me into that bathroom back in the 6th grade, because I was going to knock their blocks off. That’s one problem with failure. It can stay with you for a very long time.

The next time the dragon of failure reared his ugly head was in 1978. I was working in New Orleans for one of the greatest cotton traders of all time, Eli Tullis. Now, New Orleans is an unbelievable city. It has the Strawberry Festival, the Jazz Festival, the Sugar Bowl, Mardi Gras, and just about every other excuse for a party that you can ever imagine. Heck, in that town, waking up was an excuse to party. I was still pretty fresh out of college, and my mentality, unfortunately, was still firmly set on fraternity row. It was a Friday morning in June, and I had been out literally all night with a bunch of my friends. My job was to man the phone all day during trading hours and call cotton prices quotes from New York into Mr. Tullis’ office. Around noon, things got quiet on the New York floor, and I got overly drowsy. The next thing I remember was a ruler prying my chin off my chest, and Mr. Tullis calling to me, “Paul. Paul.” My eyes fluttered opened and as I came to my senses, he said to me, “Son, you are fired.” I’d never been so shocked or hurt in my life. I literally thought I was going to die for I had just been sacked by an iconic figure in my business.

My shame turned into anger. I was not angry at Mr. Tullis for he was right. I was angry at myself. But I knew I was not a failure, and I swore that I was going to prove to myself that I could be a success. I called a friend and secured a job on the floor of the New York Cotton Exchange and moved to the City. Today, I will put my work ethic up against anybody’s on Wall Street. Failure will give you a tattoo that will stay with you your whole life, and sometimes it’s a really good thing. One other side note, to this day, I’ve never told my parents that I got fired. I told them I just wanted to try something different. Shame can be a lifetime companion for which you better prepare yourself.

Now, there are two types of failure you will experience in life. The first type is what I just described and comes from things you can control. That is the worst kind. But there is another form of failure that will be equally devastating to you, and that is the kind beyond your control. This happened to me in 1982. I had met a very lovely young Harvard student from Connecticut, dated her for two years then asked her to marry me right after she graduated from college. We set a date; we sent out the invitations; and all was fantastic until one month before the wedding when her father called me. He said, “Paul, my daughter sat me down this afternoon, and she doesn’t know how to tell you this, but she is really unhappy and thinks it’s time for you two to take a break.” At first I thought he was joking because he was a very funny guy. Then he said, “No, she is serious about this.” I thought to myself, “Oh, my God, I am being dumped at the altar.” I’m from Tennessee. Getting dumped at the altar was the supreme social embarrassment of that time. It was a big deal. When all my family and friends found out, they were ready to re-start the Civil War on the spot. I had to remind them that the last Civil War didn’t go so well for our side, and I didn’t like our chances in a rematch. The reality was that I was a 26-year old knucklehead, and since all my friends were getting married, I kind of felt it was time for me to do the same thing. And that was the worst reason in the world to get married. I actually think she understood that and to a certain extent spared me what would have been a very tough marriage. Instead, I’ve had an incredible marriage for twenty years to a wonderful wife, and we have four kids that I love more than anything on Earth. Some things happen to you that at the time will make you feel like the world is coming to an end, but in actuality, there is a very good reason for it. You just can’t see it and don’t know it. When one door closes, another will open, but standing in that hallway can be hell. You just have to persevere. Quite often that dragon of failure is really chasing you off the wrong road and on to the right one.

By now you are thinking, how much longer is this loser going to keep on talking. My kids are all teenagers, and whenever I’m telling them something I think is important, they often wonder the same thing. But the main point I want you to take away today is that some of your greatest successes are going to be the children of failure. This touches upon the original reason I was invited here today. In 1986, I adopted a class of Bedford Stuyvesant 6th graders and promised them if they graduated from high school, I would pay for their college. For those of you who don’t know, Bed-Stuy is one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods. Even the rats are scared to go there at night. Statistically about 8% of the class I adopted would graduate from high school, so my intervention was designed to get them all into college. For the next six years, I did everything I could for them. I spent about $5,000 annually per student taking them on ski trips, taking them to Africa, taking them to my home in Virginia on the weekends, having report card night, hiring a counselor to help coordinate afternoon activities and doing my heartfelt best to get them ready for college. Six years later, a researcher from Harvard contacted me and asked if he could study my kids as part of an overall assessment of what then was called the “I Have a Dream” Program. I said sure. He came back to me a few months later and shared some really disturbing statistics. 86 kids that I had poured my heart and soul into for six years were statistically no different than kids from a nearby school that did not have the services our afterschool program provided. There was no difference in graduation rates, dropout rates, academic scores, teenage pregnancies, and the list went on. The only thing that we managed to do was get three times as many of our kids into college because we were offering scholarships whereas the other schools were not. But in terms of preparing these kids for college, we completely and totally failed. Boy, did this open my eyes. That was the first real-time example for me of how intellectual capital will always trump financial capital. In other words, I had the money to help these kids, but it was useless because I didn’t have the brains to help them. I had tried to succeed with sheer force of will and energy and financial resources. I learned that this was not enough. What I needed were better defined goals, better metrics, and most importantly, more efficient technologies that would enable me to achieve those goals. What that whole experience taught me was that starting with kids at age 12 was 12 years too late. An afterschool program was actually putting a band-aid on a much deeper structural issue, and that was that our public education system was failing us. So in 2000, along with the greatest educator I knew, a young man named Norman Atkins, we started the Excellence Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant for boys. We set the explicit goal of hiring the best teachers with the greatest set of skills to be the top performing school in the city. Now that was an ambitious goal but last year in 2008, Excellence ranked #1 out of 543 public schools in New York City for reading and math proficiency for any third and fourth grade cohort, and our school was 98% African American boys. We never would have done that had I not failed almost 15 years earlier.

So here is the point: you are going to meet the dragon of failure in your life. You may not get into the school you want or you may get kicked out of the school you are in. You may get your heart broken by the girl of your dreams or God forbid, get into an accident beyond your control. But the point is that everything happens for a reason. At the time it may not be clear. And certainly the pain and the shame are going to be overwhelming and devastating. But just as sure as the sun comes up, there will come a time on the next day or the next week or the next year, when you will grab that sword and point it at that dragon and tell him, “Be gone, dragon. Tarry with me and I will cut your head off. For I must find the destination God and life hold in store for me!” Young men of Buckley, good luck on your journey…..

This is a transcript of the commencement address to the 9th grade graduating class of Buckley School, given in 2009 by Paul Tudor Jones.

by E. E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

When you’re young and naive, without the guidance of a parent or mentor, it is hope and imagination, rather than courage and artfulness, that tend to lead you through the empty space of what’s next. There are turbulent and murky waters ahead, and you keep swimming. You hit a rock, or three. You figure how to hit less rocks, shrewdly dodge branches and logs, and keep swimming. Eventually, if you persist, and with a little bit of luck and string of good decisions, you find yourself upon a raft or boat going in the right direction. That boat for me was the people who came into my life. The miracle of how this happened was never more starkly on display than when it was the time of year for Thanksgiving. I didn’t even know what it was that first year when it came around, on the last Thursday of November.

Thanksgiving, for those who aren’t familiar, is a national holiday in the United States (and several other countries). In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving to be celebrated, and then in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation designating the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. It’s a somewhat different kind of holiday though. The entire country, apart from its motorways and airports, basically comes to a standstill in the days leading up to it, and then on Thanksgiving Day itself, relatives tend to congregate from far and wide into one family member’s home for an afternoon of feasting, football and socialising.

Several months into my first year living in New York, I was told there was a holiday coming up. And that no one would be working for five days straight, Wednesday through to Sunday. Like a good New Yorker fresh in the city, I of course planned to use the days off to work or party, likely both. Yet, no one else was really planning to party. And my hyper-competitive office effectively went MIA. Meanwhile, I had been seeing a girl, Julia, for about month, and she called in to ask what I was doing for the break. “Apparently, nothing,” I said. “Aw, come to our house, it’s Thanksgiving!” she replied. We had met at a SoHo nightclub four weeks ago. She was really speeding things up, I thought. What to do…. Well, I had a friend from back home staying with me for the week and I asked if he could come along too. Surely, that would let her know I was interested, yet take the pressure down a bit. “Of course, bring him!” she replied. So, we went to their house. The day before Thanksgiving, we took the Metro North train upstate from Grand Central Station to Connecticut, and she picked us up at the local station. I had been invited to their house for three days, and had no idea what I was getting myself into, truly.

From the moment I arrived in their home, I felt like a member of the family. I met her mom, who showed me around the house and sat me down for a cheerful coffee and chat. I met her brother, who eyed me a bit suspiciously from time to time (to be expected). The stepdad was out golfing. That evening, the six of us sat down for dinner. Mom, stepdad, brother, Julia, my friend and I, I who still felt awfully awkward. They had a chef who had prepared a meal and as we sat around the dining table, the family started asking me questions about where I was from, what I was doing in New York, and I tried my best to politely (still awkwardly) ask them about their lives. The usual get-know-each-other speak. Yet, it never once felt like an interrogation. Instead, it felt like they were sincerely interested in me, without judgment. I was sure I was saying things out of left field given the cultural differences. Yet, here I was, sitting in their home, evidently sleeping with the daughter/sister, having come into each others lives just a month prior, a young kid with a blank slate from the other side of the world, and the kindness and fairness these people showed me on the eve of Thanksgiving Day… I just didn’t know what to make of it. It was too good to be true.

And it was. That night, Julia, my friend, and I were still watching a movie while the rest of the family had long gone into bed. By this point of the evening, we were a solid few bottles of red wine into the affair, and Julia had apparently had just one too many. Or so my crisp white shirt was to find out when her glass of red wine fell all over it. My one nice white shirt. The one I had brought especially for Thanksgiving to impress the family, with the Polo horse on it and all. Well, we all took that as a sign to go to bed ourselves. By late morning on the next day, the actual day of Thanksgiving when the relatives would start arriving, there was a new white shirt perfectly steamed and laid out by the bed for me to change into. Julia’s brother had seen to that. And my own shirt was currently being cleaned, or so I was told, because Julia’s mom had seen to it.

What was going on here? I’ll tell you what. The spirit of Thanksgiving. When Julia invited me out for the holiday, my assumption was that she wanted to spend more time with me and for me to meet her family. And in some ways, ways which I was grateful for, she was. Yet, the main reason, I couldn’t fully understand at the time, was not altogether personal, it was altogether about being all together. It was simply Thanksgiving, and what it symbolised to her, to her family, and as I would come to learn over the next eight years, to much of the United States of America. A time of bringing people together, of caring for others without prejudice, of making those left out, feel the door opened.

I recall the poem, The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus, that is etched on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty for new immigrants into the USA to see upon their arrival.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

A tear comes to my eye. If only for a few days, these kind, privileged American people were lifting a lamp beside their golden door, for me.

Now, by this point you may be thinking, “That’s a nice little fairytale story, but it’s not representative of daily life.” And I began thinking quite the same, to be frank. As the years and experience of living in New York began to stack up, I came to understand for better or worse, that the more competitive, the faster the pace, the more opportunity at stake, the less kindness seemed to be present. In general, people just seemed to be too busy surviving their own battles and absorbed in the self interest of their own worlds, to choose to open much space for others unless it served their own interests. Riding the train of progress and growth meant constant (and larger) transactional wins, and arbitrary kindness apparently doesn’t pay that well. I came to understand that the overall environment was not conducive to that sort of approach to daily life. Yet, there were people who did make the intentional space to be kind. And they weren’t doing so to satisfy some need within themselves. Over the years, I would meet a host of individuals and families from a wide variety of walks of life who oozed unsolicited kindness, at least some of the time. There was a cashier at my local Duane Reade pharmacy in SoHo who I came to rely upon for a smile and laugh, no matter how heavy the day had been. There were restaurant hosts who would give us a table as walk-ins, even though the place had been fully booked for weeks. There were moms at our office kitchen, tennis sparing partners and extraordinarily wealthy individuals, all of whom were surviving (and thriving) in their lives in New York City, yet also making time and space to be kind. Unexpected kindness. This was just who they were. Nay, with the pressures of New York, I concluded this was who they had chosen to be. It wasn’t an every day thing, mind you, yet I learned to cultivate these type of relationships, so it became a more-often-than-not thing. I sought to be in the lives of people with these values, and to be able to pay it forward myself with others. If I strayed off that path, into the mountains of success and material wealth, there was always Thanksgiving every November to remind me of what else was just as important to a good life.

And as I grew into my identity in New York, year after year, the magic of Thanksgiving continued to play out in its own unique way. One year, when I truly was planning to hunker down in the city during the break, a friend and his sister invited me over last minute to their little apartment to help make the turkey for a get together they were organising for fellow hunkering downers. We all ended up celebrating together into the late hours of the night. Another year, a colleague from work invited me to fly out with him to his family farm in Vermont, introduced me to his parents and brother, showed me my room, lent me his car and said, “Enjoy yourself for the week.” And the final year, at the end of my eight years in New York, as I was deep in the throws of starting my own business and too busy and too obsessed, having recently parted ways with my girlfriend and declined several invitations to travel out of town, and when it truly did seem like this would be the year I would spend Thanksgiving alone, I met a family and their daughter while eating by myself at my go-to restaurant Souen on Prince Street (sadly since closed). The day, that day was just two days away. After a ten-minute chat, they of course asked me, “So, what are your Thanksgiving plans?” When my response yielded nothing of significance, I was promptly invited out to their cousins house in upstate New York. And just like that, as it happened in my first year when Julia taught me about the blessing of Thanksgiving as a newfound immigrant to the USA, I found myself taking the train from Grand Central to the local station upstate, where mother, father and daughter picked me up and drove me into the comfort of their world of family and friends.

They took us through spring in the lush countryside, summer floating among blissful islands and winter up on those purifying mountaintops, somewhat detached from the constructions of the social calendar and revolution of technology. And along the way, we discovered how the people approach nature with the proper reverence and respect it deserves. It's a very different idea about how you should exist, you know. They haven't severed themselves from the natural world as much, and so their relationship with it is different. And being a part of that even for a while was incredible.

We understood that much of what we experienced in our daily lives in the city, was an abstract creation of human thought. The congested train ride to and fro work. The smog from car fumes waiting idle at the traffic lights. The excruciating pain endured during that period of the menstrual cycle, every month, and still showing up, smiling and doing what has to be done, as if it was any other day. The restaurants, cafes and bars that serve predominantly stimulants and toxins by the glass, coffee, wine, spirits. The need to wake up at the specified hour and do the specified tasks, everyday, five days a week, regardless of what we’re going through privately. The events and dinners we must attend, week after week, if only to let people know we’re still in the game.

Our bodies and minds did not cope with much of this abstract world. We were able to adapt, yet this was never enough. The congested train rides inevitably drained our energy and damaged our natural immunity. The smog and low air quality made breathing harder, subtly at first, then more and more as time went on. The irrelevance of society and its people to unavoidable inner pain created both anger and numbness within. The stimulants and toxins constantly made our nervous systems out of balance and our bodies perpetually under stress. The routine drudgery of the professional and social schedule took away our zest for play and for life itself.

As a result, we began to compensate. Compensating made certain aspects of daily life easier in the short term, and other aspects inevitably harder in the medium to long term.

Eventually, we started a thought experiment together. Up until now, we had been learning about our selves and the world around us. We had seen a lot, and come to understand a great deal about the ways we function, about the way society functions and our role in it. And in the process, we had been submissive to the world’s needs and opportunities and trade-offs effectively since birth. We were very much living from the outside in. We had now lived a year amidst the rhythms of nature and witnessed the inherent harmony with which she operates, the manner in which all things find their balance and time and place in this harmony. We asked ourselves: was there now a way to prioritise health and prosperity and love and contribution, and design our experience of life from the inside out?

by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

by Emily Dickinson

All these my banners be.
I sow my pageantry
In May —
It rises train by train —
Then sleeps in state again —
My chancel — all the plain
    Today.

To lose — if one can find again —
To miss — if one shall meet —
The Burglar cannot rob — then —
The Broker cannot cheat.
So build the hillocks gaily
Thou little spade of mine
Leaving nooks for Daisy
And for Columbine —
You and I the secret
Of the Crocus know —
Let us chant it softly —
"There is no more snow!"

To him who keeps an Orchis' heart —
The swamps are pink with June.

When I was in school in England, my favourite go-to comfort tea was a cup of Earl Grey with a dash of milk without sugar.

My routine of tea drinking was not so much the actual tea drinking, but the waiting for the water to boil, mixing the tea and the milk, holding the hot tea mug between my cold hands, stuffing my nose in the tea mug for the hot steam, taking no more than five sips while snuggling up on the sofa with a blanket on my lap, leaving the tea cold, and pouring away half of the undrunk cup of cold tea.

That routine became my first unique tea ceremony.

Closer to My Roots

Then as I became older, I’ve grown to be closer to my cultural roots.

At university back home in Hong Kong, I started to do more “Chinese” activities. I drew Chinese painting, wrote Chinese calligraphy, sang Chinese opera, and read Chinese literature.

When I started working, while my friends were taking western wine courses, I learnt how to brew Chinese tea.

Since then, drinking and appreciating Chinese tea has become my favourite pastime.

Connecting Asia

When my friends come over to my place, I would offer to brew them Chinese tea. When I’m on the road, I would carry with me a mini tea set and make time for tea. When I travel in Asia, I would visit a tea house and learn how the Japanese perform their matcha ceremony, how the Taiwanese ferment and roast their tea, and how Shantou people brew their Kung Fu Oolong tea.

In Asia, the rules are similar. We all care very much about the water quality, the water temperature, the brewing time, the absolute concentration of brewing, pouring and serving tea. We might be talking to our guests, but in our head we are also counting that 15 seconds for the first brew, then 20 seconds for the second brew and testing the water temperature for every brew.

We all seem to share the same roots for tea drinking and treat it a serious matter. We all seem to drink tea for the same purposes — to nourish the self, to connect with our friends and to bond with our families.

Tea drinking is not an end, it’s a means.

Process of Meditation

Before I drink my tea, I would observe the clarity of the golden tea colour and the elasticity of the tea leaf on display. I would smell the flower and honey aroma and would feel the heat in my palm.

With every sip, I would taste the complexity of the single origin tea from that 200 years old tree, and would enjoy the aftertaste of the natural flavour of plum, mint and fire.

When I take that sip, I think about nothing but that cup of tea in front of me. It is like meditation except it works better than sitting and breathing meditation. It’s a state of calmness, clarity and joy.

The Meaning of Being Chinese

In China, we have 56 ethnic groups and a few hundred languages/dialects. If I just travel one hour north to some second or third-tier cities, I would find myself speaking very differently from the local people. We might be able to communicate in our national language Putonghua, but sometimes with the older generation we would only understand each other 20% to 50%.

But it would never be a problem, because we could communicate in tea. Every time I travelled to the Mainland China, friendly strangers would invite me to sit down and have a cup of tea. Sometimes in a forest, sometimes next to the road side, and sometimes in a shop.

They are always very proud of their local tea. They would pour me a cup of tea and wait nervously for my reaction to their local treasure. In return, I would always pay back with a reassuring smile and a nod of appreciation.

The meaning of tea drinking is deeply rooted in the Chinese culture — sharing tea is a gesture of extending love, trust and respect.

I used to wonder what kind of Chinese I am growing up in a colonial city, only to realise that there are many types of Chinese as it is a vast and diverse culture after all.

Turns out, I didn’t stop drinking Earl Grey tea for comfort on a gloomy day, but I also find calmness in drinking my Phoenix Oolong tea on a Saturday morning.

Submission by Candy Au

Yesterday on Facebook, my lovely hippy pastor posted:

What is the best thing your mom taught you about faith? How did she teach you?

I remember being six or seven years old, standing with my mom behind my grandmother’s house. This was the same house my grandfather had built by hand — hauling field stone for the foundation on a sledge pulled by draft horses — the year before my mother was born.

She spread her arms wide, taking in the entire family farm and the woods around. “God is everywhere, in everything,” she said. “You don’t have to seek God out — just pay attention.”

What prompted her to say this at that moment isn’t obvious. Did it relate to a conversation the adults had been having inside the house? Was it in answer to something she’d heard at church — something she agreed, or disagreed with? As for me, the kid — I gazed at the nearby plum tree, trying to imagine what it would mean if God were us, the chickens, the cat…if God were inside each of those fragrant purple plums.

I think we’ve finally located the source of my lifelong Pantheism — which I didn’t realize wasn’t how everyone believed until three years at divinity school taught me otherwise. How could anyone believe differently? I wondered. Isn’t our unity with Source obvious?

For those who haven’t tuned in lately, Pantheism is “the belief in many or all gods, or the belief that God exists in, and is the same as, all things, animals, and people within the universe.”

Though the term was born in the mid-18th century, scientists, philosophers, and theologians from every generation believed this way. The priests of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, Lao Tzu, Thales, Heraclitus, Marcus Aurelius, Meister Eckhart, Giordano Bruno (who burned at the stake for his beliefs in 1600), Goethe, Hegel, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Emerson & Thoreau, Nietzsche, Sitting Bull, Chief Seattle, Einstein, and good old Stephen Hawking have embraced the concept.

The poet Robinson Jeffers wrote a letter to his friend, Sister Mary James Power in which he summed system of belief up beautifully.

I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole…. I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine.

So, how did my mother — who grew up on a farm in rural Alabama — arrive at the same conclusion as did these famous men? The answer seems to be in what she told me as we stood in the afternoon looking across the farmyard.

What was it she said? Oh yes…

“The universe reveals itself to us every moment of the day, every moment of our lives.”

“Just pay attention.”

Submission by Holly Pettit

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The prosperous and beautiful      
To me seem not to wear  
The yoke of conscience masterful,     
Which galls me everywhere. 

I cannot shake off the god;     
On my neck me makes his seat; 
I look at my face in the glass,——    
My eyes his eyeballs meet. 

Enchanters! enchantresses!      
Your gold makes you seem wise; 
The morning mist within your grounds     
More proudly rolls, more softly lies. 

Yet spake yon purple mountain,      
Yet said yon ancient wood, 
That Night or Day, that Love or Crime,      
Leads all souls to the Good. 

I adore this expression. It is so elegantly simple, yet encapsulates much of the experience of life.

There are huge swaths of the universe where time completely dilates because of the intensity of a nearby mass. Einstein’s Special and General Theory of Relativity explains this to us, and it has been observed by astronomers, yet in the every day experience of life and the small distances (relatively speaking) we engage with on planet Earth, time seems to move quite linearly. Except in our minds, it certainly does not. Nor does it in the evolution of mankind or the influence we have on the planet itself.

Time and its counterpart, energy, express themselves in decidedly non-linear ways.

This brings up a wide assortment of conceptualisations in my mind. From the interplay of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics and the mind’s yet unsolved involvement in this. To some more down to earth, human ways.

What I do when no one is watching. And what I do when everyone is watching. Matters.

What I think and do when I can only see the dark of a never-ending tunnel. And what I think and do when the lights shine brightly on the world around me. Both matter.

How I treat the people whom I deem can be of no benefit to me. And how I treat the people who I believe to be able to change my life. All matter.

How I conduct myself in the face of everything going devastatingly wrong, apparent or real. And how I conduct myself in the glory of everything going my way. And everything in between. They all matter.

Who am I really, but not the human that is able to make the decades count, just as much as the weeks where the heavens align and shine down upon my life. Waiting for the moments only when it is right to wait; while more often than not, I am the one with the opportunity and responsibility to mould the decades into weeks, the weeks into days. In my relationships, in my contribution to society, in my experience of life. I am the one with the capacity to contract my experience of time by the energy I generate and energy I move with intention, gratitude, elegance, focus and force of will.

Just as time slows down when the universe’s spacetime approaches the gravitational intensity of a galaxial cluster or black hole. Just as time evaporates when I am in the present moment with my beloved. Can I live with this presence in my mind and my life, for a lifetime?

By Lord Byron (George Gordon)

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!