character

One finds, as one lives and grows older, that he has all along been developing a life philosophy – by trial and error, through experience, through education and knowledge, through hardship, through heartache, through interpreted memory and through every other ingredient of life – all having been submitted to the influence of one’s innate, unnamable proclivity of character – so that, finally, what has been instinct or error, intution or inspiration, begins to coalesce into conscious choice, a natural measure of action, as if one were reading an instruction book or a ‘how to’ manual that has been imprinted on his heart and mind. Life has trained us at last to be ourselves, not subject to the winds of opinion or to tyranny or to threat or to contentiousness, but guided by the sure lights of what we we have become, what we know. We apply, in older years, not experiment but experience, not emotion but distinction.