Walt Whitman on Owning Your Life

At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary c...