Years pass, many books read, lectures, conversations held. I feel unease about my points of view. It’s just that I am the beneficiary of others, the writers, Professors, the friends who have contributed their minds, their passions. All became components, a composition of the sense of reality that I “call” my own. I suspect this lifelong pursuit of a sense-of-self and world, has been involuntary.

When I have been strong enough to admit challenge, to abide a way of life that felt strange, even alien, perhaps a position opposite to the one that mattered to me – difference has been more precious than has agreement. Yes, I advise myself to “make peace” with discomfort, with the discord and friction which difference always brings…

Make it a rule
never to withhold or conceal
from yourself
anything that may be thought
against your own thoughts.

Vow it!

This
is the essential requirement
of honest thinking.

You must undertake such a campaign
against yourself
every day.

A victory
and a conquered position
are no longer your concern,
but that of truth

—and your defeat also
is no longer your concern!

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 370

A final thought: Stephen Levine wrote, when “you see what [your] heart really needs it doesn’t matter if you are going to live or die, the work is always the same.”