An exercise in self observation.
Purple, shiny, headache.
Round eyes, widen.
Look!
Up, down, slanted.
Focus fading, ears engaged.
Scars on cheeks meet air flowing.
Contacts blurring. . .
Stubby fingers scratch, knees rub, press.
Teeth grabbing flesh, tongue searching for blood.
Pinching and chewing, swishing side to side...
Exit.
Streams....
It is such an unusual experience to be friends with people who are so innately different from oneself. To have them tell you flat out how ridiculous your way of being is, how your very rationale for living and the values you hold most deeply are rather disadvantageous to being alive. Seriously? To live the way you live sounds so foreign to me, so simplistic but meaningless. I do enjoy simplicity, but it is never in a way that forsakes the more transcendental elements of life. How can someone flourish in such an environment?
More to the point, life without genuine and prolonged reflection involving constantly trying to see all sides of an argument sounds so, so, so unnatural to me. Living a life that is taken at face value, with little moment-to-moment thought spent contemplating the life-changing value of each experience.... I must try not to be too judgmental about it, because obviously there is something that works in that kind of lifestyle. The problem is, they do not give me the same courtesy and tend to undermine my own methods of experiencing the world through their own thoroughly expressed opinions...perhaps unaware of the impact of their words because of how little other's words impact them....
And then I go about my daily consultant work, learning slowly not to take in the constant contentiousness of clients. That is easy, they are isolated incidents of irascibility from people with no direct link to my personal bubble of relationships. But to have friends be so incapable of the same level of consideration I always strive to provide is something that is a never-ending source of stress for me. And perhaps it is just me complaining about something I simply need to adjust to... always need to adjust to. To fully be considerate of those people I must learn to see why they do what they do, to be able to understand the perspective that is so strange and unknown to me and that on some level repels me. I do in that way look forward to the challenge of bearing my soul to those who are in no way prepared to handle it, even as it causes me to cringe and cry out with a lonely sort of anguish.
It would be so fascinating to spend a few days living as someone else. Maybe a few other elses.
