“You can’t reach for anything new if your hands are still full of yesterday’s junk.” - Anonymous

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual” by Arnold Kunst

The first hint that this may be love is manners. It seems always to start out as [innocent] bean-counting. It runs something like this: “I’ll be happy to scratch your back if you’ll be good enough to scratch mine.” It develops into the real thing only insofar as my love and I step out into the abyss and the one ask for and the other confer forgiveness [because sooner rather than later each of us is going to screw up]. It’s the real thing if forgiveness – matching the screw-ups - becomes habitual.