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Was I blind to another’s discomfort? Probably. It happens. Yet I was blissful and living, I had no agenda and felt pure…for a moment.
Isn’t it a rotten thing to recognize that your companion, be it a date, a friend, a co-worker, isn’t as happy as you at a particular moment? That perhaps your happiness and ignorance makes the other person more miserable? I suppose it depends on your happiness, for if it is so effervescent that it annoys or makes your friend shut down completely, is it worth it?
This happened to me recently. I was unaware of another persons discomfort and so I went happily along like one of the 7 Dwarves. Singing my song, praising the sun, feeling the sand between my toes with glee, while my companion slowly but surely became tied up in knots, unable to speak at all. He was drowning while I was bathing.
If I recall this day in such a way I feel terrible. I chastise myself for being so unaware but to be perfectly honest, at our age, I can’t be held totally responsible. I was not being cruel and I thought my friend was happy too. I suppose we both shirked our responsibility (yes as humans I think we have a responsibility to be aware of others), one to express more freely and the other to keep more of a keen eye/ear open. It’s too bad really. I was quite content, I wanted nothing but to walk and enjoy the beauty of our surroundings. I feel sorry that my friend did not enjoy it in this way for his mind was elsewhere creating scenarios that did not exist and only served to torture himself back into a quagmire.
And then I go back to feeling like a selfish fool because I was having a ball, I felt the years shedding away!
Blast this awareness thing!
Then again, some people are far too serious…the wind was then taken from my sails and I had to row home.
“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Tales Of A Wayside Inn, The Theologian’s Tale; Elizabeth
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Walter Kitty's Diary 
Sometimes I think of all the innocent animals, insects and other living thing I unintentionally destroy every day. ( really, I do.) I may be becoming too conscious. Uggghhh what to do?
Convert to Jainism? Or just acknowledge the goodness in yourself because you’ve acknowledged their existence. Someone is listening and you count too.
I take it the guy just wanted to get laid…. I know so clearly what he saw, and you don’t, and never will…
That is the beauty of “Mandom” an infinitely simple place only made extremely complicated by women.
No one wants to pass in the night.. or, at least not before engaging in a little bit of hanky panky.
Dude you are getting funnier and funnier. Laid? Me think not. I couldn’t have been in a more simple-minded mood that day. No complications oozing from my pores…for once. I don’t want to know what he saw because clearly it wasn’t good. Oh well, next port!
By the way Scott the picture above is of a Galway Hooker (boat). Thought you might like that. Personally it is my favorite boat.
slut
Sloop