This set of portraits from the 1890s provides a very good lesson: These people posed in the overly serious manner of their time, but they were playful too, and that side of them broke through easily enough, as we see here.

The people of the past were not ‘other’ than us: they were us, in different circumstances. While there are differences between people in different eras, they are surface differences, not really differences in substance.

The fashions of our age – the ways ‘everyone’ behaves – will some day be gone, and will seem to our future counterparts as silly as Victorian manners do to us now. What actually matters is what’s inside of us: the kindness, willfulness and creativity we bring into the world. Conforming to an era is a waste to beings like us.

* * * * *

So, before going back to the mundane, see yourself as a being separate from the impositions of your time. Learn how to focus on your essentials, and to identify the mere impositions of an era. Determine to develop the former and slough-off the latter.