Youthful Life: X

"One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood." Lucius Annaeus Seneca Friendship in adulthood becomes more complex and somehow simultaneously more simplistic. I often find myself thinking randomly of my friends and the people I care about. Something I hear, see, taste, smell, or feel will remind of them, and suddenly it's as if they are right here with me. I am warmed by their spirit and feel their presence with me. I smile to myself and am comforted with the fond memories that they have shared with me. Friendship, like all relationships, change with proximity. Those who I am physically closer to often are the forefront of my mind, and when I drift to the thoughts who are a distance away I find myself hesitating.  What is it about distance that makes us forget what we have already established? I worry needlessly that a text from me is a disruption to the life my friends are living without me, but my entire underst...

"Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses  the glory of being alone." Paul Tillich Adulthood is lonely . And by lonely, I mean the mere act of being by yourself. There is a difference between loneliness and just being alone. There's inherent value assessment there. The former comes with negative implication, and the latter is nothing more than an ambiguous state of being. I think we are socially conditioned to want the company of others, to be in contact, and to communicate. I also think we rely too much on others to determine who we are instead of spending the time needed to decide for ourselves who we are, and even more so to not decide who we are in relation to others. It's only natural. We spend the majority of our lives surrounded by people whether with be family, friends, or community - then, suddenly, you're on your own. Seeing other people becomes a deliberate act instead of a mundane reality. We have to do things of our ...

" Every person has a different view of another person's image. That's all perception. The character of a person, the integrity, that's who you are." Steven Alford The way we understand the world and how we situate ourselves within it is unique to our perspective. There is something both distinctly remarkable, and isolatingly unsettling about that. We are the only ones who go through what we do - in the ways that we do. Think about headaches, visibly no on else knows what when have one, but we ourselves feel an intense pain. That pain though is felt in the most literal sense by us, and us alone. There can be a sharp difference between the ways that we see ourselves and how others see us/experience us. Similarly, who we believe ourselves to be is not ho others experience us as. When asked how friends, family, or coworkers would describe us, often our answers are different than we would say about ourselves. What is the meaning of that dichotomy? If we believe...

" Unworthiness is the inmost frightening thought that you do not belong, no matter how much you want to belong, that you are an outsider and will always be an outsider. It is the idea that you are flawed and cannot be fixed. It is wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable, or wanting to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving." Gary Sukav Social media is a gift and a curse. It gives us unprecedented access to others in dynamic ways. That access though can easily become a vice. When we are inundated with idealized chronicles of the escapades of others, the impact can be overwhelming, toxic, and downright malignant. There is no way we can separate between who we are online and who we are in real life. Our online personas are in fact part of our real lives, and they are part and parcel to who we are now. I don't think we've really come to terms with the ramifications of that hybridization, or fully processed what that exactly means. The time we spend...