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

by Eleanor Roosevelt

Perhaps they may steer someone away from the pitfalls into which I stumbled or help them to avoid the mistakes I have made. Or perhaps one can learn only by one’s own mistakes. The essential thing is to learn.

But this, at least, I believe with all my heart: In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

There is a wonderful word, why?, that children use. All children. When they stop using it, the reason, too often, is that no one bothered to answer them, no one tried to keep alive one of the most important attributes a person can have: interest in the world around him.

every child’s why should be answered with care—and with respect.

without interest, it is almost

impossible to continue to learn; certainly, it is impossible to continue to grow.

Of course, unless it is checked, imagination can remain only a means of escape; but if it is nourished and directed, it can become a flame that lights the way to new things, new ideas, new experience.

child is particularly fortunate if he grows up in a family where his imagination can be fed, where there are a variety of intellectual interests, where someone loves music, or does amateur painting, or is engrossed in literature, reading aloud perhaps, or just exchanging comments about what is being read.

I think it is a tremendous loss to a child to grow up in a family ...

Good talk, indeed, is important not only as a part of family life but as a part of education. A child from that kind of family life can go out into school or his business or profession much better prepared both to contribute and to absorb new impressions.

Along with the stimulus of good talk, of the education that comes almost unconsciously from casual discussion of books read, from a gradual knowledge of music heard as part of daily life, there is also the great value of surrounding a child with objects of beauty, which, almost imperceptibly, help to form taste.

Perhaps the most essential thing for a continuing education is to develop the capacity to know what you see and to understand what it means. Many people seem to go through life without seeing. They do not know how to look around them.

One of the secrets of using your time well is to gain a certain ability to maintain peace within yourself so that much can go on around you and you can stay calm inside.

I learned that the ability to attain this inner calm, regardless of outside turmoil, is a kind of strength. It saves an immense amount of wear and tear on the nervous system. In this oasis of peace you are better able to cope with the noisy and conflicting demands of young children without irritation or impatience.

It is possible, as I have discovered, to be relaxed and restful in spite of any amount of physical turmoil without. For a person who has a busy schedule which makes great demands on his time, this is an invaluable thing to acquire, because you will be able to use your time in the best possible way without being disturbed by every little thing, by having your nerves jangled or losing your trend of thought, or, most disrupting, fighting against and resenting the noise and the interruptions.

The second most important thing is to learn to concentrate, to give all your attention to the thing at hand, and then to be able to put it aside and go on to the next thing without confusion.

you can finish any task much quicker if you concentrate on it for fifteen minutes than if you give it divided attention for thirty.

You cannot use your time to the best advantage if you do not make some sort of plan. I

though I do not believe in too rigid a pattern.

Inflexibility will make your life an unnecessary burden and it will also make it dull.

unless time is good for

something it is good for nothing.

The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing wh...

A woman cannot meet adequately the needs of those who are nearest to her if she has no interests, no friends, no occupations of her own. Without them, she is in danger of becoming so dependent on her children for these things that she is apt to be equally dependent when they have left home.

The development of interests while you are bringing up your children is important to them, too. The wider their range of experience, the greater the variety of people they encounter in their home life, the farther their horizons will extend and the more hospitable to new ideas they will be as they go out into the world.

Since everybody is an individual, nobody can be you. You are unique. No one can tell you how to use your time. It is yours. Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it.

Those years, weeks, hours, are the sands in the glass running swiftly away. To let them drift through our fingers is tragic waste. To use them to the hilt, making them count for something, is the

beginning of wisdom.

You must try to understand truthfully what makes you do things or feel things. Until you have been able to face the truth about yourself you cannot be really sympathetic or understanding in regard to what happens to other people. But it takes courage to face yourself and to acknowledge what motivates you in the things you do.

The knowledge of how little you can do alone teaches you humility.

Actually, an important part of self-knowledge is that it gives one a better realization of the inner strength that can be called upon, of which

one may be quite unaware.

Life teaches you that you cannot attain real

maturity until you are ready to accept this harsh knowledge, this limitation in yourself, and make the difficult adjustment. Either you must learn to allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it; or somehow you must make yourself learn to meet it. If you refuse to accept the limitation in yourself, you will be unable to grow beyond this point.

If you refuse to do it, you will become dishonest with yourself, making a pretense that the limitation is not there, that you have not failed. But the situation has remained unsolved and the deception fools only yourself.

So it is a major part of maturity to accept not only your own shortcomings but those of the people you love, and help them not to fail when you can.

Sometimes we are apt to regard as limitations qualities that are actually the other person’s strength. We may resent them because they are not the particular qualities which we may want the other person to have. The danger lies in the possibility that we will not accept the person as he is but try to make him over according to our own ideas.

If you try to change that individual so that he loses his personality, you have done something that has destroyed the most important thing about a human being, his essential difference from anybody else. Any one of us who tries to make someone over and force him into an image of what we think he should be, rather than encourage him to develop along his own lines, is doing a dangerous thing.

The only way in which we can really help people to develop is to let them do it themselves, trying to show them by demonstration, if we can, the things that are really needed. But to force anything upon an individual is rarely successful in helping him

develop his own individuality.

Just as we must learn to accept the limitations of others, so we must learn never to demand of someone else what is not freely offered us.

What is freely given in love or affection or companionship one should rightly rejoice in. But what is withheld one must not demand.

Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

But it is always the woman who is making the chief adjustment, finding how to behave in order to get what she wants, and also to give what she has to give. There are few cases in which women do not accept the fact that their homes must be run to suit their husband’s needs and wishes, in which they do not adjust to the way of life of the man with whom they now have life’s closest

relationship.

The man, on the other hand, often grows up with the idea that he should be able to dominate the forces of nature, the forces of his material world. He seeks to make them adjust to him. It is one re...

It seems to me that one is forced to make inner and outer readjustments all one’s life. The process never ends. And yet, for a great many people, this is a continuing problem because they appear to have an innate fear of change, no matter what form it takes: changed personal relationships, changed social or financial conditions.

Every age, someone has said, is an undiscovered country. We are constantly advancing, like explorers, into the unknown, which makes life an adventure all the way.

The rewards for each age are different in kind, but they are not necessarily different in value or in satisfaction.

To be unable, because of inflexibility, to readjust to changes will result in a kind of sterility, great unhappiness, and sometimes almost a state of shock.