There’s so much I don’t understand.   I long to life a life of transparent honesty, but that’s just not practical in our superficial polite society.  It’s all about what’s easy and politically correct instead of what’s real.  When someone ask, “How are you doing?” they expect a positive answer.  If you tell them the truth they are uncomfortable and don’t know what to say.  No one knows what to do with the pain.   As a culture we are not given any tools with which to deal with pain – there’s no etiquette for this.  There’s no precedence for this transparency.  This seems universally true – in work, play, school, church… there’s no room for pain.  No one really wants to know about your pain and no one wants to honestly share their pain.  Everyone wants to pretend to be ok – well-adjusted – happy – but most of us are dealing with some kind of brokenness, some kind of pain, even if we don’t quite have a name for it. 

   How do we break this habit?  Is that even possible?  Will we always be a society of isolation?  We have more methods of connecting now more than ever before – yet we have never been more alone.  All communication have become trivial and the art of sharing reality has been lost.  Gone are the days of love letters… we are in an era of romance via hallmark.  We depend on someone else to communicate our affections or not at all.  If a card or e-mail forward does not contain the feeling we wish to convey we founder – having no words of our own.  Why?  Because we are a society of observers… always watching, reading, listening – not thinking, feeling, sharing.  We surround ourselves with media in lieu of nature, we seek triviality rather than solitude – we spend our energy on status rather than investing it in another.

    Where does this leave us?  It leaves us all lost and lonely.  It leaves us in a home crowded by TV, radio, internet, video games – where two lonely people live who have forgotten how to share what is most important – themselves.