absence and presence
 
Because I lack companionship these days, all of my past friends are with me. I’ve been blessed with many many friends over the years, in different cities and countries. Now that I have only recently moved back to my ‘point of origin’ as it were, none of them are around.

I have reached out to the few old friends from high school days here who haven’t moved away. They are busy with their families for the most part – with little time for old bachelor me.

But it’s an interesting phenomenon how the immediate absence of my friends around the globe actually enhances my sense of their presence in my life.

I have always felt that making a friend means seeing the world to some extent through their eyes. These somewhat lonesome days, I find myself thinking, this friend or that friend would see this such a way.

And sometimes I feel the whole crowd of them at once and realize how liked I have been and am reaffirmed in liking myself.

security and danger

One whose focus is security sees danger everywhere.

I experience this fact fully through some of my family members.

My grandmother perceives horrors around every corner. Her sense of things is that the world is full of malignant madmen.

Her daughter, my mother, tears address labels off of shipping boxes before throwing them away for fear her identity will be stolen.

My father counts his change carefully after each cashier hands it to him, because you never know who’s going to stiff you.

Me, I’m fearless to the point of being foolhardy, so I recoil a bit from what I see as irrational trepidation on their part.

I suspect that the best path cuts through the middle ground between them and me, and that finding the balance is the key.

Big thanks to Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie for this exercise in thinking about and writing about ‘opposing forces‘.