

“How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?”
― Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
― Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“What would happen to our lives, our world, if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child, saying in so many words: “You are precious to us; you will always have our love and support; you are here to be who you are; try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can; when you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us, but you are also here to leave us, and to go onward toward your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.”
― Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
― Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Going through means that we have to experience what we not wish to experience, for to flee it is even worse.”
― Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
― Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“To become a person does not necessarily mean to be well adjusted, well adapted, approved of by others. It means to become who you are. We are meant to become more eccentric, more peculiar, more odd. We are not meant just to fit in. We are here to be different. We are here to be the individual.”
― Through the Dark Wood: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
― Through the Dark Wood: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

“In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles.”
― What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life
― What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life
Michael’s 2024 Year in Books
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