The Road Less Traveled

This book is one of The New York Times Bestseller, written by M. Scott Peck, who’s a writer, thinker, psychiatrist and spiritual guide. It talks about discipline, love, and growth. It teaches us how to live a full life after we admit the fact that “Life is difficult.”, how to distinguish depedency from love, and how to become one’s own true self.

It’s a book that I’ll read twice, and I wrote down some sentences impressed me most for the first reading.

I Discipline

Life is difficult.

Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.

Problem-Solving and Time

And I know that I and anyone else who is not mentally defective can solve any problem if we are willing to take the time.

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

Responsibility: We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them.

Escape from Freedom

My time was my responsibility. It was up to me and me alone to decide how I wanted to use and order my time.

The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.

We have, however, the freedom to choose every step of the way the manner the manner in which we are going to respond to and deal with these forces.

Openness to Chanllenge

Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature——perhaps the one that makes us most human——is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.

II Love

Love Defined: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

Ultimately, if they stay in therapy, all couples learn that a true acceptance of their own and each other’s individuality and separateness is the only foundation upon which a mature marriage can be based and real love can grow.

Dependency

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it. The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and you cannot be a person worthy of love when your primary goal in life is to passively be loved.

Allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself. … If you expect another person to make you happy, you’ll be endlessly disappointed.

Self-Sacrifice: Whenever we think of ourselves as doing something for someone else, we are in some way denying our own responsibility.

III Growth and Religion

The road of spiritual growth, however, lies in the opposite direction. We begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar, by deliberately challenging the validity of what we have previously been taught and hold dear. The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.

IV Grace