Today's Quote

I came accross this post while reading a co-workers blog. She studies instructional design at BYU and I found this quote both eloquent and insightful. This relates to all of us but especially for Helen, Jim, Jill, and Jeff who meet and deal with many people every day and have a real opportunity to help and connect with people. This is from Mary Parker Follett, The New State, chapter 12, 1918:

Every man comes to us with a golden gift in his heart. Do we dare, therefore, avoid any man? If I stay by myself on my little self-made pedestal, I narrow myself down to my own personal equation of error. If I go to all my neighbors, my own life increases in multiple measure. The aim of each of us should be to live in the lives of all. Those fringes which connect my life with the life of every other human being in the world are the inlets by which the central forces flow into me. I am a worse lawyer, a worse teacher, a worse doctor if I do not know these wider contacts. Let us seek then those bonds which unite us with every other life. Then do we find reality, only in union, never in isolation.”

But it must be a significant union, never a mere coming together. How we waste immeasureable force in much of our social life in a mere tossing of the ball, on the merest externality and travesty of a common life which we do not penetrate for the secret at its heart. The quest of life and the meaning of life is reality. We may flit on the surface as gnats in the sunlight, but in each of us, however overlaid, is the hunger and thirst for realness, for substance. We must plunge down to find our treasure. The core of a worthy associated life is the call of reality to reality, the calling and answering and the bringing it forth from the depths forever more and more. To go to meet our fellows is to go out and let the winds of Heaven blow upon us - we throw ourselves open to every breath and current which spring from this meeting of life’s vital forces.”