Page 78 - LiveOnProjectlori with front cover

The Live-On Project

So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful
struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its
inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks
without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve
gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only
calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much
they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And
the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that
they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really
counts at all. It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems — he
would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk
better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would
mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.
And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people — by the
degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry
and tolerate — and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a
mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your
ancestors were living again through you.
-Author Ted Hughes, Excerpt of letter to his son after death of his
mother Sylvia Plath
Hughes, Ted; Reid, Christopher. (2008). Letters of Ted Hughes,
Macmillan.

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