You see what power is – holding someone else’s fear
in your hand and showing it to them

So, before we go too much further, now is a good chance to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, we are all a little guilty of sometimes living someone else’s aspirations for us instead of our own. And this is a great time to say ‘No more!’ to living out of fear and other people’s expectations.

We have learned to live by other people’s points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?

It’s often a good idea to adopt the practices and beliefs of the people around you. For one thing, the people around you aren’t dead. If you do what they do – eat what they eat; avoid the dark alleys they avoid – you might continue not being dead as well.

The fear of the other makes us resemble the other who fears us.

We have to do our best to uphold in our own lives the values that they were prepared to die for. We have to honor those who carry forward that legacy, recognizing that people cannot live in freedom unless free people are prepared to die for it.

It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

... because here I was having a life, even though it was a pastiche of elements of the life of someone else.

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.

Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

NOTHING HURTS MORE THAN LIVING SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE.

An unexamined life isn’t worth living, or so they say. The problem with living up to other people’s expectations too much is that it doesn’t leave us time to have a life. Take a moment. Ask yourself this question, and don’t be afraid to look deeply: Are you allowing someone else’s expectations to control your life? Examine the expectations you’re living up to; then live by your own inner guide.

I’ve learned that even people who are — who see the world differently from you, they love something. And if we take the time to share what we love with one another, we can see each other’s humanity, and we can feel each other’s value. And if we can connect in a real way, that’s what we need to accompany each other, because some of what is going to be asked is that you just let me be. You know. As relocation and all of this stuff happens, some people are going to choose something other than what you would choose.