of watching others succeed ... so smoothly... so pleas-
antly... so surely... have taught me a better way to
success. And a better way of life.
I've outgrown building a fortress around my
demands. The immobility of a fortress makes it a prison.
Besides, who needs a fortress if he has no de-
mands to defend? A fortress serves no purpose in moving
forward toward a goal-and that is what Life really is all
about.
Then I found the gray area. Everything really
isn't black or white-right or wrong-at all. It only looks
that way to youth and to those adults whose minds haven't
grown up. Hence all those silly protest marches, and
sit-ins, stand-ins, teach-ins-and, even worse, some very
radical believe-ins. All dramatized, of course, by the ex-
hibitionists.
But the world smiles understandingly at the
adolescent behavior-not its misguided exploiters-then
goes about its important business in the gray area which
I didn't know about, either, when I was young and inex-
perienced.
Yes, the gray area, where the black and white
edges of extremism blend into understanding and agree-
ment.
The gray area where everybody's point of view
can be respectfully considered, where everybody gives a
little and gets a little, where negotiation may be hard or
may be persuasive, but leads, if we just work at it enough,
to the hand-clasp of mutual resolution.