Different Drums for Different Drummers

If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell that my want 
is wrong.

Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my 
view.

Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same 
circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.

Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for 
action, let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me.
That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into 
a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or 
your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or 
emotions, or beliefs, or actions, than you open yourself, so that 
some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might 
finally appear to you as right-for me. To put up with me is the first 
step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my way ways as right 
for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me 
for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me you might come to 
prize my differences form you, and, far from seeking to change me, 
preserve and even nurture those differences.