Past the halfway point?

I appreciate your care and support, Mark, and can feel it too.

I hope you love you.

Hi ya Big Bro,

Aint it just Murphys law that some Questions are hard to voice, and yet finding the Answers even harder!

I reckon maybe you are aware of the answers bro, just find them hard to understand or maybe accept.

You have loads of love inside of you and share it willingly with others both here and in the outside word.

Soooo chin up

Love Ya!

Hah, well, at fifty I'm past the halfway point of time on the planet. I know how short twenty or even thirty years really are, now, and obviously, it could be a lot shorter. So, mostly I was asking myself whether I was on track ... So, in a sense, I was listing my life goals, as a reminder to myself of what's important.

Partly, this was due to spending another wasted afternoon at work, which doesn't seem to further any of these goals any more. So I was checking to make sure that I'm not hiding out there, trying to avoid one or more of my priorities ...

Too, for some reason in my work environment, I have a harder time relating to the people around me. There's a shift of perspective (based on the need to cover up my perceived deficiencies, as described in previous blogs) that makes me feel more adversarial to my co-workers than to pretty much anyone else, in real life or online. Not a feeling I enjoy. And I just wondered whether it isn't partly connected to feelings towards my ex, because I'm mostly still working there because it's the only way to make enough to pay for the house we bought together.

I just thought the questions were a shorter and more generally applicable way of saying all that. :-)

Hey, Mark. Long time, no speak. I hope things are going well.

I know these questions were intended for you to answer, but I figured the exercise would be beneficial to me as well.

1. No.

2. Yes. Well... except for my father. I hate him. But I love the rest of my family.

3. Yes. My friends both on and offline are the ones who have kept me sane over the last year and a half.

4. Some are nice. Others... not so much... When you've had a teacher who knows you're depressed but refuses to offer you any sort of assistance, you lose some faith in humanity.

5. Honestly? No. The world could be such a better place if people were more understanding.

Hey, MM. :-) I hope you're doing okay, too.

I'm not even sure the questions were intended to be answered ... I know that for me, they're not really yes/no questions, and the real point was about making sure that those I love know it. If I had to choose a yes or a no, I would probably answer yes to all of them, "to the best of my ability".

But I don't mind trying to address your answers one by one.

1. Why not?

2. And could the answer to (1) be due in part to your answer to (2)? Hate is a powerful emotion, and I wouldn't call it the opposite of love. To me, that's apathy, not caring at all; hate is the flip-side of love, and inseparable from it.

3. I'm glad that you have friends, and that they help you. I hope you give yourself credit for keeping yourself sane, though, even if you did it by reaching out.

4. When you love people, is it always because they're nice (or because they're always nice) to you? Can you find it in you to love people as people, even if they're not nice, for one reason or another?

When I was a kid, I lived in a French-speaking country for two years. We got there at the tail end of a school year, so we got thrown into classes which were entirely in French. It was horribly boring and disorienting (and scary), because we never knew what was going on. The teachers never spoke any English to us, and when I later found out that of course they all spoke it, I was pretty angry at them. Only when I looked back on it much later did I realize that they were trying to help me, by depriving me of the crutch of using English. By the end of two years, I spoke fluent French, so I guess it worked ...

5. Here I meant the world, the planet, nature, the place I'm bound to spend my short life on. I'm not sure that I take as good care of it as I could.

{I figured (4) covered the world of other people. As for people understanding each other, I'm tempted to throw you the quote attributed to Buddha: "Be the change you want to see in the world." If you can understand why they're the way they are, you can start expecting them to do the same.}

And like most of my blog posts, this was meant to start conversations (internal and external), so thank you. :-)

Number one is definitely the most challenging for me. Still working on that, though I do think I'm on my way.

It's 2 boys, but you get the idea. Thanks for listening to me, even when I'm grumpy. Hope you have a nice weekend.