One begins the slow walk back to health by choosing each day things that enliven one's selfhood and resisting things that do not.

As often happens on the spiritual journey, we have arrived at the heart of a paradox: each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around-which puts the door behind us-and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept its fro

there is as much guidance in way that closes behind us as there is in way that opens ahead of us.

I ask them instead to help each other see how limitations and liabilities are the flip side of our gifts, how a particular weakness is the inevitable trade-off for a particular strength.

The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen.

Then we get into small groups to learn more about our own natures through the two cases. First, I ask people to help each other identify the gifts that they possess that made thegood moment possible.

When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless-a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for.

What happens to that theory when my vocational motive is virtuous, not egotistical: to be a teacher from whom students can learn or a counselor who helps people find themselves or an activist who sets injustice right? Unfortunately, the theory of limits can work as powerfully in these cases as it does with my presidential prospects. There are some

I was fired because that job had little or nothing to do with who I am, with my true nature and gifts,