The Look

People will let you down.

That shouldn’t be a shocking statement. Most will agree with it. Live long enough and you will be the victim of disloyalties big or small at least once, or you will know someone who was. Still, with all our experience, we rarely see the big one coming. Quality relationships require emotional investment, and emotional investment makes you vulnerable.

Vulnerable people get “that look” when the hammer drops.

Islands Shouting Lies

“We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”

— Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed

The public life that we lead is a façade; a mask we wear that is in large measure demonstrably false, primarily because it is an incomplete representation of who we truly are in private.

There are three reasons for this division between the public and the private life.

No More, Eleanor

I know more than a few lonely people.

There’s no single — or simple — explanation for their loneliness. There are those who, often through no fault of their own, are social misfits, unable to successfully relate to those around them. There are those whose days are solitary as a result of their own life choices, and those who are housebound because of disability or age, and those who have lost a life-partner whose companionship cannot be replaced. Then there are people who, despite being surrounded by caring friends and family, feel a deep-seated and abiding loneliness because they cannot make one particular relationship work, and that absence matters to them so much that every other blessing in their lives pales into insignificance beside it.

Add it all up, and more than a few of us feel very much alone in this world, and those who are not lonely now may well be lonely later.