Relations

How strong is your sense of connection to others? How much of your connection is driven by your emotional or resource needs or physical desires? How much of your connection is driven by your shared values, ideas and interests? Do your relationships all have the same flavor or do you experience every one differently?

Imagine that you are alone in a dark, silent place. You can't see or hear anything. As far as you know, there is no one else there. You feel like you're floating, and you can't touch anything. You don't have any connection to anything else. Do you have any idea how long you've been in this condition? Keep imagining this - how long can you stay there with your eyes closed? Are you imagining that there are other people there, just waiting? Are you beginning to listen for the sounds of the real room?

"Do you ever think of your life as a story?"
Your life is a story woven of your connections and relations with everyone else and the world around you.

Quotes

“One of the secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.
Lewis Carroll

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
C.G. Jung

"Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people."
Arthur Schopenhauer

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
Elbert Hubbard

“No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

"And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems — the ones that make you truly who you are — that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: it's got to be the right wrong person — someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, 'This is the problem I want to have.'"
Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe

“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“It is the time that you wasted for your rose that makes her so important.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
Oscar Wilde

"Life has taught us that love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction."
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“Well, it seems to me that the best relationships - the ones that last - are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is... suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”
Gillian Anderson

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.”
Mae West

“I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face,I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you, Meredith, and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine.”
Laurell K. Hamilton, A Lick of Frost

“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.”
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

"I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin."
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

"War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince