may be our business, we can best put ourselves in a position to
enable the other person to see his own mistake by dropping all
personal resistance to it and all personal strain about it. Even a
mother with her son can help him to be a man much more truly if she
stops worrying about and resisting his unmanliness.

"But," I hear some one say, "that all seems like such cold
indifference." Not at all--not at all. Such freedom from strain can
be found only through a more actively affectionate interest in
others. The more we truly love another, the more thoroughly we
respect that other's individuality.

The other so-called love is only love of possession and love of
having our own way. It is not really love at all; it is sugar-coated
tyranny. And when one sugar-coated tyrant' antagonizes herself
against another sugar-coated tyrant the strain is severe indeed, and
nothing good is ever accomplished.

The Roman infantry fought with a fixed amount of space about each
soldier, and found that the greater freedom of individual activity
enabled them to fight better and to conquer their foes. This
symbolizes happily the process of getting people off our nerves. Let
us give each one a wide margin and thus preserve a good margin for
ourselves.

We rub up against other people's nerves by getting too near to
them--not too near to their real selves, but too near, so to speak,
to their nervous systems. There have been quarrels between good
people just because one phase of nervous irritability roused
another. Let things in other people go until you have entirely