What Openness Looks Like

David Richo, from an interview by Susan Johnston, The Urban Muse, April 2011:

The most exciting part of finding out who we are is discovering our own uniqueness, who we are outside the box, beyond the categories in a Psychology 101 textbook. In our inimitable singularity, there is an infinite range of possibility that cannot be tied to any one description of what it means to be human or healthy.

Just as our fingerprints are one-of-a-kind, so is our identity. Each of us is a once-only articulation of what humans can be. We are rare, unmatched, mysterious. This is why the quality of openness is so crucial to our self-discovery. We cannot know ourselves by who we think we are, who others take us to be, or what our driver’s license may say. We are fields of potential, some now actualized, most not yet. Poetry goes to that quarter of what humanness is about. It is what openness looks like on a page."

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See also: Richo, D. (2009). Being true to life: Poetic paths to personal growth. Boston: Shambhala.