A member of this community and wiser friend wrote in with a lovely reflection with her takeaways on the post on celebrating ourselves. One of her reflections was around making a conscious effort to make her own mistakes, living her life the way she wanted to live and not living a life others wanted her to live.
And, to that end, she shared this quote from ‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro. The book is about a butler who served a Nazi master and is about how his extreme loyalty to his master cost him dearly. The quote –
“Lord Darlington wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?”
A keeper.
A Learning a Day 