Start your journey with E. E. Cummings who said, “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” Then invite Samuel Johnson to join your trek. He is the one who said, “There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.” You should let Friedrich Nietzsche come along too, for he said, “At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth, and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”

Julius Charles Hare also has some advice qualifying him to serve as your traveling companion, “Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.” It was your fellow traveler, Samuel Johnson, who said, “Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.”

With that in mind, find room in your party for John Mason. You need his wisdom, “You were born an original. Don't die a copy.” “Rabbi Zusya said on the Day of Judgment that, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.” (Walter Kaufmann) Just be sure you are not asked why you hadn’t been you. …

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According to Orson Scott Card, “This is how humans are. we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.” Wonder if this is true

If so, there are things you believe just because you believe it and others that you believe simply because you’ve never given any thought to not believing.

Add this to Felix Cohen’s observation, “Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories,” and you are left with a discouraging conclusion. Most of what you think is true and factual, most of what you really believe, is little more than one more theory, just another personal opinion.

There is an important glitch here. Most everyone else also chooses belief over non-belief, subscribes to one more theory, another personal opinion. That then becomes their belief, the principle according to which they live. Of course, since you really believe, you are right and they are wrong. The way you choose to live is good and right, and the way they choose to live is wrong and unjust.

Here is a suggestion that might lessen the tendency to discount everyone else’s perspective. Pick one principle you use to govern your life. Assume you are wrong, that this cherished principle is invalid. How would that change your world, your perception of you and your actions?

While you are contemplating this alternative reality, keep in mind most of the people in the world are certain that your valued principle, your most cherished belief is wrong.

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“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.” Christopher Morley’s point is certainly worth pondering, for as the famous Anon. observed, “It would not be at all strange if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident of the nineteenth century. It is as Iris Murdoch argued, “The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”

“When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it,