Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.

Our inner guide, our conscience, desires to be heard every step of our way today. And the choice to listen is easy if we've developed trust in those messages from our heart. There is no absolute path we need to follow in this life, but some will be more advantageous to our destiny than others. And some paths will weave themselves more smoothly among the paths of other travelers. We are all moving toward the same destination.

How thrilling it is to recognize that there is a message center within that has foreknowledge of our needs today, of the direction most fitting to the growth that's in store presently. We are not lonely, forgotten figures in the universe. We have purpose. And we can fulfill our purpose if we are acting in concert with our heart's message. When we move softly through the day, we can be certain of hearing the words forming within.

We only do well the things we like doing. - Colette

When you were a child, did you feel you had to do everything you were told to do? If you didn't perform all tasks equally well, did you feel that something was wrong with you?

When you were young, many of us never were told that we were doing as well as we could. Or if we were told, we didn't know how to hear it. It has taken some of us years to learn that to do something well often means to do it as well as we can. And somewhere inside us, those children still groan over tasks they can't do easily.

It helps to remember that we are not alone. Something we find difficult to may have all sorts of repercussions for us and for others. We can always ask for help. Other people are pleased when we ask them to share their skills. When we know how to console the child within, we need never feel inadequate.

. . . the healthy, the strong individual, is the one who asks for help when he needs it whether he's got an abcess on his knee or in his soul. - Rona Barrett

It is not that we should shoulder our problems alone. We are in the company of others by design, and the growth that each of us needs to experience is tied closely to both the sufferings and the celebrations that come to us all.

We each have the capacity to nurture and guide another's wavering steps. But the invitation to help must be extended. Perhaps we need reminding that each of us carries within us the remedy for another's ills. Likewise, someone among us awaits our call for help. We are accompanying one another on this journey because together we can smooth away the rough spots that would cause us to stumble if we were traveling alone.

Many calls for help will be made today, and some of us will be ready to respond. All of us need to remember that one of our greatest gifts is offering comfort to our stumbling friends.

A truly total history would cancel itself out - it's product would be nought. -- Claude Levi Strauss

The world has always been as rich and varied as it at this moment. Wealth and poverty, joy and pain, peace and struggle have always existed side by side. The history of human life is the history of each person's journey from birth to death.

When we study history, we're always reading someone's interpretation or argument. The total history could never argue a point or prove an interpretation. We each can never tell many true stories about ourselves by selecting facts from our personal histories. Yet our total history will cancel these stories and show us to be neither saints nor villians, merely seekers.

There's much we can learn from other's stories. They can illuminate our path; they can persuade us of the wisdom of one choice or another. Yet to be fully human is to escape the neat outlines of such a story. We immerse ourselves in life; we are surrounded by it.

The liar leads an existence of unutterable lonliness. - Adrienne Rich

All human interactions are built on agreement. Language itself depends on agreement: we agree, broadly, on the meaning of friend, blue, danger, cold. We agree on times of meeting, rules of procedure, and appropriate behaviors for many situations.

To lie is to break some of those agreements. "I returned your call" is a harmless lie, we might think, but if we didn't return the call, then we're lying about the intentions and our actions. It would be so much similar for us to say, "I meant to return your call." So why don't we?"

One important motive for telling such lies is to make ourselves look good. "I returned your call;" "I don't know how the paint got chipped;" "Someone stole my gloves;" all these are small falsehoods in which we claim that our performance was error-free -- whatever slippage occured wasn't our fault.

Human beings aren't error-free. We forget things, mislay our gloves, backs into telegraph poles. We're human. Pretending we're not isolates us from the rest of humanity. Not only do we break the agreement at the base of language; we set ourselves apart from each other. We pretend we are more perfect than someone else; we condemn ourselves to lonliness.