Growth that Starts from Thinking
？埃莉诺·罗斯福 / Eleanor Roosevelt
It seems to me a very difficult thing to put into words the beliefs I hold and what they make me do in my life. I think I was fortunate because I grew up in a family where there was a very deep religious feeling. I don’t think it was spoken of a great deal. It was more or less taken for granted that everybody held certain beliefs and needed certain reinforcements of their own strength and that came through their belief in God and their knowledge of prayer.
But as I grew older I questioned a great many of the things that I knew very well my grandmother who had brought me up had taken for granted. And I think I might have been quite a difficult person to live with if it hadn’t been for the fact that my husband once said， “ it didn’t do you any harm to learn those things， so why not let your children learn them？ When they grow up they’ll think things out for themselves.
And that gave me a feeling that perhaps that’s what we all must do—think out for ourselves what we could believe and how we could live by it. And so I came to the conclusion that you had to use this life to develop the very best that you could develop.
I don’t know whether I believe in a future life. I believe that all that you go through here must have some value， therefore there must be some reason. And there must be some “going on”. How exactly that happens I’ve never been able to decide. There is a future—that I’m sure of. But how， that I don’t know. And I came to feel that it didn’t really matter very much because whatever the future held you’d have to face it when you came to it， just as whatever life holds you have to face it in exactly the same way. And the important thing was that you never let down doing the best that you were able to do—it might be poor because you might not have very much within you to give， or to help other people with， or to live your life with. But as long as you did the very best that you were able to do， then that was what you were put here to do and that was what you were accomplishing by being here.