Live like a Mighty River

One of my very favorite websites is Letters of Note.

I urge you to go check it out but mostly it is a collection of great correspondence. 

One of my favorite letters is Live like a Mighty River

Explanation of the letter as found on Letters of Note: 
In 1986, 23 years after the death of Sylvia Plath, celebrated poet Ted Hughes wrote the following letter to their 24-year-old son, Nicholas, and, quite beautifully, advised him to embrace his "childish self" so as to experience life to its fullest.Tragically, during a period of depression in 2009, Nicholas took his own life. He was 47.

Some of my favorite quotes from the letter: 

"I hope things are clearing. It did cross my mind, last summer, that you were under strains of an odd sort. I expect, like many another, you'll spend your life oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking. Nobody's solved it."

"But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It's an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child."

"That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember."

"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."

"And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy."