Different Drummers

[Chy]

An excerpt from Please Understand Me II by David Kiersey

If you do not want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.

Or if my beliefs are different from yours, at least pause before you set out to correct them.

Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do.

Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, please let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me into a copy of you.

If you will allow me any of my wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself to the possibility that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear as right-for me. To put up with me is the first step to understanding me.

NOT that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And one day, perhaps, in trying to understand me, you might come to prize my differences, and, far from seeking to change me, might preserve and even cherish those differences.

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, your colleague. But whatever our relation this I know: You and I are fundamentally different and both of us have to march to our own drummer.

People are different from each other, and no amount of getting after them is going to change them. Nor is there any reason to change them, because the differences are probably good. We differ in fundamental ways. We differ in ourthoughts, in our feelings, in our wants and beliefs, and in what we say and do. Differences are all around us and not difficult to see, if we look. Unfortunatly, these variations in action and attitude trigger in us an all too-human response.