Doing Their Best

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… She reflected on the possibility that young men were a completely alien breed, and that however much you tried to get them to see things the way you saw them, you were destined to fail. And that perhaps was part of the secret of leading a life in which you would not always be worrying about things, or complaining about them, was to accept that there were people who just saw things differently from you and always would. Once you understood that, then you could accept people as themselves as they were and not try to change them. What was even more important, perhaps, was that you could love those people who looked at things so differently, because you realized that they were not trying to make life hard for you by being what they were, but simply doing their best. Then, when you started to love them, love would do the work that it always did and it would begin to transform them and they would end up seeing things in the same way you did.

~ Alexander McCall Smith

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