You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

by Eleanor Roosevelt

We obtain our education at home, at school, and, most important, from life itself. The learning process must go on as long as we live. Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can grow only as long as we are interested.

Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

She had the courage to meet discouragement and turn defeat into a victory. People can surmount what seems to be total defeat, difficulties too great to be borne, but it requires a capacity to readjust endlessly to the changing conditions of life.

And yet, even if there is no problem of distance involved, one must make a continuing effort to keep personal relationships warm and close, in the family as well as among friends. Human relationships, like life itself, can never remain static. They grow or they diminish. But, in either case, they change. Our emotional interests, our intellectual pursuits, our personal preoccupations, all change. So do those of our friends. So the relationship that binds us together must change too; it must be flexible enough to meet the alterations of person and circumstance.

When she found that it was hard work to obtain the power by doing something that required real effort and development on her part, she accepted the easier way of gaining power through being an invalid. She made use of the terrible strength which is weakness. She wanted happiness, but her method of seeking it defeated her.

Curiously enough, it is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.