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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

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But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of  endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the  bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes  nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation  to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident  that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and  down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.  

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.We are set down in life as in the element to which we best  correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of  years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we  hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors,  they are our terrors; has it abuses, those abuses belong to us;  when there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we  arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now  still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. 

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into  princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps  everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless  that wants help from us.

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