Love and risk | The Road Less Traveled

The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness.

The act of love -- extending one's self -- requires a moving out against the inertia of laziness (work) or the resistance engendered by fear (courage).

The more lovingly we live our lives the more risks we take.

Though they may outwardly appear to be adults, even successful adults, perhaps the majority of "grown-ups" remain until their death psychological children who have never truly separated themselves from their parents and the power that their parents have over them.

What does this business of growing up to do with love, apart from the fact that the extension of the self involved in loving is an enlargement of the self into new dimensions? ... [Making] major changes are acts of self-love. It is precisely because I valued myself that I was unwilling to remain miserable in a social environment that did not fit my needs. It is because the housewife had regard for herself that she refused to tolerate any longer a marriage that so totally limited her freedom and repressed her personality. It is because the businessman cared for himself that he was no longer willing to nearly kill himself in order to meet the expectations of his mother.

The highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity.

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Dr. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

From sections:

The Risk of Loss

The Risk of Independence