By feeling their pain, I protected myself from my own. - Anne Truitt

We tend to mix genders when we arrange ourselves around a table for meetings. A sort of accommodation is made by the men for the women: they make space for us. they are ever-so-slightly polite, we are ever-so-slightly grateful. When we stand up at the end of a meeting, we all give ourselves a metaphorical shake that is only partly the relief of having concluded our business: we are all released from the effort of fitting ourselves together.
When men speak in these meetings, women relax; when women speak, men grow tense. I have the impression that they never know what a woman is going to say, whereas they are reasonably sure what a man will address himself to and how he will do it. So are the women; for them, too, men tend to be predictable. Women listen to women with a different kind of attention, and part of it may be loyalty to our gender; we want all of us to do well, as if we have the esprit de corps of subalterns among generals.

The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s inner development is a feeling of having laid down a burden and picked up a more natural responsibility.

It is as if I had to take Sam back into the uterus to protect him, to reestablish the placental connection in order to nourish him through his crisis. Perhaps because of this primitive reaction, his recovery is marked by an increasing independence for both of us, a feeling of health and ease as if, in some mysterious way, he had accomplished his second birth, into adulthood, by means of this violent accident.