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When we talked about risk-taking on campus last Thursday, there was a range of reactions to the idea of accepting the inevitability of random disaster in this life--some of us thought it a sort of sheer resignation, to be resisted; others the better part of a sort of Buddhist acceptance of things as they are. There's a similar spectrum laid out in a piece in today's NYTimes Week in Review,
"When the Limits Push Back," which compares the deep psychic need for "heroic transformation," the "hope of purification," with "the lesson that is really needed: self-acceptance."