Guide to (Child) Health

"Health and the ability to love:

We have said that being healthy means being able to confront the world's phenomena freely and with interest. Two aberrations are possible here--on the one hand, withdrawing from the world in order to brood and believing that the truth that will change the world can be found only within ourselves; on the other hand, succumbing completely to the allure of daily life, increasingly renouncing self-assertion, and being driven by events like a leaf in the wind. Inner integrity in the first instance and self-sacrifice in the second--both positive attributes unless taken to extremes--become unbalanced. Being healthy means being able to make flexible use of our options as the situation demands... We can speak of illness only when people lose self-control or are so fixed within themselves that they can no longer alter their situation by themselves...

Both the self-sacrificer and the egotistical loner lose the ability to love. This ability, however, is the inner foundation of human health. On the one hand, it means being able to take part in the world's affairs with interest, allowing the people and events in our surroundings to become alive in our own souls; on the other it means holding back and allowing others to be free."

From pages 134-135.