Exploring Individuality - Different Drummers

The following is extracted from the book "Please Understand Me" by David Keirsey and reprinted here with permission. If you wish to 'understand more of personality' then you can visit www.keirsey.com

"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 than yours, at elast pause before you set out to correct them.
Or if my emotion seems less or more intent 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
up 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 march to
our own drummer"

Quote: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears
a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far
away" Henry David Thoreau.

In the most beautiful garden no flower is identical: the individualised tones and shades of
colour do not fight with each other, but assault the eyes with a magnificence of harmony.
This is the awesome beauty of nature.

This is also the astounding excellence of humanity :) We are not the same, no two
anywhere the same. If we can but accept that, celebrate it, treasure it perhaps then
we have the harmony of the garden.

Paradise is here, we have only to see it and where we feel it is lacking then we have
only to create it afresh.