Please understand me

"If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.

Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.

Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.

Or yet if I act , or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, parent, your friend or your colleague. If you allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong and might finally appear to you as right - for me. To put up with me is the first step to understand me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.

Well, stranger, there isn't any way you can really understand me, but if you stop trying to change me to look like you, you might come to appreciate me. I'll settle for that. How about you?"

- Taken from the book Please understand me

I am reading this fantastic book and the opening page just blew me away. I simply could not stop myself from writing about it here. And as always, if I find anything more interesting I will definitely share it here.