on being human

Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person (1961)

...I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people.

For the entirety of my young and skittish life, I had fixated upon my fear as if it were the most interesting thing about me, when actually it was the most mundane. In fact, my fear was probably the only 100 percent mundane thing about me. I had creativity within me that was original; I had a personality within me that was original; I had dreams

“It’s the greatest gig in the world, being alive. You get to eat at Denny’s, wear a hat, whatever you wanna do.” -Norm Macdonald

frightening how many of our wounds come from trying to be less than we are

-river kenna

To be human is to be “a history-making creature who can neither repeat the past nor leave it behind,” noted W. H. Auden in a brief biographical sketch of D. H. Lawrence. In Kierkegaard’s most famous words: “Life must be lived forwards, but it can be understood only backwards.” And as Mark Twain put it in his inimitable style, “Although the past may