1Other people are not the trouble that gets in the way of my good life. They are where it happens. I cannot open a way for no one.
2We are one household, whether we like it or not. This is the One Hearth. The smoke of my fire drifts into the neighbour's window, and his into mine. What I do to him I do to the air we both breathe.
3The one who wrongs me is steering by a bad map. Somebody gave it to him, or he drew it in fear. This does not make the wrong smaller. It tells me where the mending has to start. To hate him for his map is as useful as hating a man for being lost.
4How should I treat an enemy? First, stop him from doing harm, if I can. That is owed to everyone he would hurt. Second, do him no harm beyond that. Third, leave a door open behind him, so that if he ever wishes to come back to the hearth, there is a way. Many feuds have lasted three lifetimes only because neither side could find a way to stop without shame.
5If I answer his cruelty with cruelty, there are now two cruel men where there was one. I have not beaten him. I have joined him.
6Before I name someone my enemy, have I ever sat down and eaten with them?
7I will be forgotten by people I have helped, and wronged by people I have trusted. I should know this beforehand. I do not mean that I should be bitter and trust no one. I mean it the way a farmer knows there will be frost: it is no reason not to plant, and I will not take it as a personal injury when it comes.
8Some people are hard to bear: the boaster, the whiner, the one who must always be right. When I meet one, ask what they are afraid of. The boaster fears he is nothing. The whiner fears nobody hears. The one who is always right fears what will happen if he is once wrong. It is hard to stay angry at a frightened person.
9And remember that to somebody, I am the one who is hard to bear.
10A child is not clay for me to shape into a second self. A child is a fire that I am keeping until it can keep itself. My task is to give it air and fuel, and to keep it from burning the house or going out. It is not my place to tell it what colour to burn.
11What is it to raise a child well? It is to send into the world someone with more ways than I had: who can read more, make more, think more freely, love more easily, and fear less. Every lesson I give should be tried by this. Does it open them, or does it only make them easier for me?
12Never lie to a child. They are drawing their first map, and they are drawing it from me. If I tell them the dog has gone to live on a farm, I have taught them two things: that the world is softer than it is, and that I cannot be trusted to say what is so.
13Children do not do what I say. They do what I do, and they do it when I am no longer there to be ashamed.
14When I correct a child in anger, the child learns about anger. To teach anything else I have to wait until I am calm.
15Let them fall while the falls are small. The child who was never let climb the low wall will meet the high one with no practice. My fear for them is love, and it is also a cage if I let it build one.
16A child's "why?" is the Fire waking. If I answer the tenth "why" with "because I say so," I have blown on it the wrong way. Better to say, "I do not know. Let us find out." Then they learn that not knowing is where finding out begins, and that grown people do it too.
17One day my child will choose a road I would not have chosen. If I have done my work, they are able to. That day is not my failure. It is the proof that I raised a person, and not an echo.
18A friend is one before whom I can think aloud. Keep two or three, tell them the truth, and ask the same of them. A friend who only agrees with me is no more use than a mirror.
19To love someone is to want their ways open, even the ways that lead away from me. This is the hard part. The love that says "stay as you are, stay where I can see you" is a kind of owning that has dressed itself as love.
20In a long marriage the other person changes, and I am tempted to hold them to the one I married. But I did not marry a statue. Greet the new person each few years. They have had to do the same with me.
21My parents are old now and slow, and they tell the same story twice. Once I was slow, and asked the same question twenty times, and they answered. The debt is plain enough. More than that, they are frightened, as I will be, at the narrowing of their ways. Every small choice I can leave in their hands is a door kept open a little longer: what to eat, where to sit, when to go out.
22The stranger on the road has a mother, a fear, a sore foot and a plan for the evening. I know this without asking. Why then do I treat him as part of the scenery?
23Gossip is passing along a map of someone, drawn by one who does not love them, to those who will never check it.
24When I must tell someone they are wrong, do it alone with them, and quietly, and leave them a way to change without losing face. If I shame them before others, they must now defend the error to defend themselves. I have nailed shut the very door I wanted them to walk through.
25I argue to win. I should argue to find out. If I win and he is not persuaded, I have only made him quiet, and a quiet man still holds his old belief.
26With a closed mind, do not hammer on the door. Sit down outside it. Ask questions, and mean them. No one opens to a battering ram, but people will sometimes open to a guest.
27In a crowd, I am not as wise as I am alone. The crowd's heat gets into me, and its hatreds and its hurry too. When I find myself shouting what everyone is shouting, it is time to step out to the edge and ask whether I would say this by my own fire.
28I do not need to be liked by everyone. If I did, I would have to become someone different for each of them, and there would soon be nobody left at home.
29Someone hates me. It may be that I earned it; look into that honestly. It may be that I stand for something in his mind that has little to do with me. Either way, his hating is done in his house and not in mine. I need not go and live there.
30When someone tells me I have wronged them, the first thing out of my mouth should not be my reasons. It should be, "Tell me." My reasons will keep.
31To forgive is not to say it did not matter. It mattered. To forgive is to stop making him pay, and to stop making myself the collector. I have seen people carry an old wrong for forty years, taking it out each evening to look at. It was heavy, and the one who did it had long forgotten.
32Must I forgive one who is not sorry? I can lay down my own end of the anger. That is in the Near Hand, and it frees me. I cannot give him back my trust; that he must earn, and it is his to mend. So I need not hate him, and I need not hand him my purse again either. Forgiveness opens the door to him. He still has to walk through it.
33The liar is hard to deal with, because he spoils the common map. Do not lie back. Do not call him a liar in the square, which only makes him lie harder. Say what is so, plainly, each time, and let the two accounts stand side by side in the daylight. Truth lasts longer, since it does not have to be remembered.
34There are cruel people, and some will not be mended by my patience. I do not owe them my throat. I may bar the door, and call the watch, and stand between them and the weak. What I may not do is take pleasure in their pain. The day I enjoy it, something of them has got into me.
35They did me a kindness and I am already working out how to repay it, so that we will be even. Must we be even? Being a little in each other's debt, back and forth, for ever, is most of what a neighbourhood is.
36How many people did I truly look at today? I do not mean how many I passed, or dealt with. I mean looked at.
37When someone is grieving or afraid, I rush to fix it. I offer three plans and a saying. Usually they did not want a carpenter. They wanted someone to stay with them a while.
38I have been lonely in company and at ease alone. Loneliness is not having no one near. It is having no one I am telling the truth to.
39Those who came before me are other people too. I owe them a fair hearing. They were not fools because they lacked what I was handed. And those who come after will look at my certainties the way I look at the old remedies.
40People will let me down. I will let them down. Any house with more than one person in it runs on being let down and beginning again. The art is to begin again quickly, before the cold gets in.
41Give trust first, in small things. Someone must go first, and the one who waits to be trusted before trusting will wait in an empty room. I will sometimes be cheated. Count it as the cost of living among people. It is cheaper than the other cost, which is living among walls.
42I am told to treat all people as one household. But I do not love the stranger as I love my daughter, and I will not pretend to. I think the teaching asks something plainer. Let my love for my own be where I learn what every person is worth to someone. Then let me not do to anyone's daughter what I could not bear done to mine.
43I cannot make anyone good. I can make it a little easier for them to be good near me: by expecting it, by noticing it, by not punishing honesty, by leaving them a way back when they fail. A person is partly made by what the people around them make room for.
44They praise me today. The same mouths may blame me tomorrow, and for the same act. Neither tells me much about the act.
45Of all the people I have met, how many did I leave with more ways than I found them with? A word that gave heart. A thing taught. A debt forgiven. A truth told in time. I have no other count of a life than that one.
46May your ways stay open. I say it at every door. Some days I do not feel it. I say it anyway, to the neighbour I am tired of and the man I do not trust. I have noticed that the saying, done long enough, pulls the feeling after it. The words are a rope, and I am the one being hauled in.