BETWEEM FRIENDS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 378, 12 June 1928, Page 5

BETWEEM FRIENDS

People whose lives are in a muddle are often heard to sty, sighingly* "Ah, if only I could hive a fresh start, a really clear beginning all over again.” And we all come under this delusion—the delusion that there ever is, for anybody, any such thing as an unhampered beginning. Our present „ hinged not only on to our own part, but on to the past of our parents and grandparents and forgotten forefathers. This is true not only in the sense of heredity, but in the sense of the results of conduct in broad and obvious and in small and queer ways. We are not free either of the personal or the ancestral past of the man with whom we fall in love, the woman who is our greatest friend. Half the disagreements and quarrels ii the world must be due to the long arm of the past, especially as it is felt through the tradition of the family, reaching into the present—the present that we considered so comfortably secure or so airily detached! All our lives, too, are intricately connected by a network of relationships—none the less real or effective because they are often unnoticed or forgotten. We cannot make ourselves free of other people or of ourselves, but we can face the truth, cease striving for the impossible, and make honourable terms with our limitations. Any outward action or plan that we contemplate is liable to be modified or interrupted by our consideration for someone else, usually someone whom we love. The only real freedom belongs entirely to the inner life. There w« can find the core of the true self, distin ct even from the qualities which it inherited, the experiences it has attracted, a living thing whose whole health and zest lies in non-capitulation—even’ while in outward living it knows endless patient acceptances and loving adjustments.