An appeal to my better nature
My dear wife sent me a note in response to my last post. Trudy reminded me of something important: when strangers speak to us, we have an opportunity to brighten their day. And while she was too gracious to say it, we have an obligation to interact with them, to love them. The flip side to the problem of uncensored self-exposure discussed earlier is unreflective withdrawal. I forget that we are all wounded (me included), and that grace received must become grace extended. Too often I retreat, preferring to escape the situation than to engage in it. While he probably wasn't thinking of all this (though maybe a variation of it), Wordsworth comments on the source of both sides of the problem, and their solution, in the fourth book of his long autobiographical poem The Prelude : When from our better selves we have too long Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, How gracious, how benign, is Solitude; How potent a mere image of her swa...