Jung puts the burden squarely on each person. This psychology of individuation, of making what you are, and of what you’ve inherited of the universe, of making that specific, of making the collective in you individual, and carrying it as an individual, and not only standing still in it, but moving through life in your own way -- this is the hardest thing you can ask of a human being.
- Laurens Van Der Post from the documentary Matter of Heart about the life and work of Carl Jung.
Moving through life in your own way is the most difficult thing you can ask of an individual. A thousand pressures to conform, to meet others’ expectations, to blindly accept the dominant values of the culture, to choose comfort over the risk involved in creating a big life. To ignore your own inner beauty and instead offer the world your acquiescence. By choosing a big life over a low-risk life of comfort, you make others uncomfortable with the compromises they’ve made. That’s uncomfortable.
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The two-page spread above is taken from the book Nurturing the Song Within which explores the inner work underlying creative work. More here. This book explores what it looks like, in practice, to live one's own life on one's own terms.
The Taoist and Zen mountain hermits asked the same question; so did Thoreau, Rilke, and Rumi — each in their own way, their own wilderness.
