Remember that there are no final solutions to anything. To try to find final solutions to things is like trying to do away with the waves of the storms of the sea. You have to have a good ship, a good rudder and a good compass. The solution to things lies in seamanship. Or, to change the metaphor—it is said in this Work that it sells leather from which you can make good shoes. You cannot clear away all the mud and stones and pebbles, but you can construct good shoes to walk over them.

And so you must understand that we have to make something very strong in ourselves by the help of the Work little by little so that we can withstand the shifting scene, moments of happiness followed by moments of depression, moments of hope followed by moments of despair, in order that we may have a center of gravity within ourselves so that we are not shaken because now we feel happy and the next moment we feel unhappy.

Personality, roughly speaking, lives by comparison with others. Real ‘I’ does not exist through comparison. Therefore you will understand that when it is said that personality roughly lives by comparison, you only have to study yourself or others in this light for a short time to see how easily everyone is upset or chagrined, and how brittle this feeling of 'I' is, in which people keep on trying to live—that is, in the feeling of 'I' derived from some aspect of personality.