Gentleness is infectious. I could feel the thought of it affecting my very mood and spirit as I read the early, unpublished pages of this book for the first time. We live in a warring, contentious world where most people think they must struggle to survive. Sometimes it does seem to be that kind of world, with people always choosing sides and arguing with others about what we should think and how we should behave. This is a particularly fractious time in our national history, when everybody seems to feel that he or she must enlist in this or that cause and oppose certain ideas or ways of thinking that others are expressing so forcibly. I have felt it, and so have you. But as I read Jim's book it began to assure me that life doesn't have to be that way. There is a gentle way-a loving way-that beckons us to a completely different kind of being and thinking. The people of the world don't have to be at odds with one another. We don't have to take sides and contribute to the tension and ugliness.