The Pressure of People

Rodney Collins, The Theory of Conscious Harmony (1949)

The pressure of people from many different sides -- if one really exposes oneself to their questions, requirements, hopes, demands -- can provide the force to drive one forward, provided one holds the rudder straight...

the pressure of others --

some who require you to be better than you know,

others who tempt you to be as weak as you were,

those who ask questions whose answers you can only learn in trying to answer,

those whom you have to force yourself to ask,

the one who can talk about recurrence,

and the deformed beggar who catches your leg as you walk along the street,

the one above and the one below --

All these push you if you don't spare yourself.

It is up to you to make them push you in the right direction.

The only other thing which I have found to produce the same effect is the pressure of ideas urgently needing to be expressed -- in writing, painting or something like that. And curiously enough, this is also the pressure of people -- those from whom the ideas come and those to whom the ideas go.