If you don't want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.
Or if my beliefs are different
from yours, at least pause
before you set out to correct
them.
Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do.
Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for
action, please let me be.
I don't, for the moment at
least, ask you to understand me.
That will come only when you
are willing to give up trying to
change me into a copy of you.
If you will allow me any of my
own wants, or emotions, or
beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself to the possibility
that some day these ways of
mine might not seem so wrong,
and might finally appear 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 one day, perhaps, in trying to
understand me, you might
come to prize my differences,
and, far from seeking to change me, might preserve and even cherish those differences.
I may be your spouse, your
parent, your offspring, your
friend, your colleague. But
whatever our relation, this I
know: You and I are fundamentally different and both of us have to march to our own drummer.
If a man does not keep pace
with his companions, perhaps it
is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Or if my beliefs are different
from yours, at least pause
before you set out to correct
them.
Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do.
Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for
action, please let me be.
I don't, for the moment at
least, ask you to understand me.
That will come only when you
are willing to give up trying to
change me into a copy of you.
If you will allow me any of my
own wants, or emotions, or
beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself to the possibility
that some day these ways of
mine might not seem so wrong,
and might finally appear 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 one day, perhaps, in trying to
understand me, you might
come to prize my differences,
and, far from seeking to change me, might preserve and even cherish those differences.
I may be your spouse, your
parent, your offspring, your
friend, your colleague. But
whatever our relation, this I
know: You and I are fundamentally different and both of us have to march to our own drummer.
If a man does not keep pace
with his companions, perhaps it
is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.