When you connect to someone on a human level, and you get to know about them, you can begin to love the things that make them different. That's when fear dissipates, and that's when we can live the life that we're all supposed to be living.
Interpretation
Connecting with others humanizes them and fosters love for their uniqueness, reducing fear.
This quote emphasizes the importance of establishing human connections in order to appreciate and love the differences that make each individual unique. By moving beyond superficial judgments and engaging with others on a deeper level, fear diminishes and opportunities for authentic living arise, allowing us to embrace a richer and more fulfilling life together.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the importance of empathy and understanding.
When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn't experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you're black. A kind of lifting of the veil.
What I have wanted to do is take roles that are unexpected for people who look like me. Roles that the establishment would say, 'Oh, she couldn't possibly be that.'
I don't know why women aren't allowed to have the same sort of breadth and scope and flaws of men.
I don't like the term 'colour-blind' - because I don't want people to be blind to my colour.
My mom asked me one day at lunch in a very lovely and respectful way. I was finally comfortable enough to say yes, I was gay, and it really was never talked about again.
If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour - whether that neighbour is near or very far away - forget about meditation.
It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.
S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.
Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.
The task of organizing human happiness needs the active cooperation of man and woman: it cannot be relegated to one half of the world.
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