Getting it right

 

Subject: Getting it right.

Do I hear the virus smashing into my bedroom window like a moth seeking light. Does it speak with an Indian accent and unlike its benign English cousin, is rampant and noisy much like the people it is named after. Now with potential to infect and leave behind the dead and dying my forays out into the big wide world  are masked and alert.  I dodge groups of people, seeking the prescribed 3 metre space assured that the Indian variant hasn’t learnt to jump even further !

Outside the front door is mayhem and pox, on this side its peace and security. The BBC is  still trailing its uncluttered programs and providing my only link to the sobriety of yesteryear, no illegals trying to scam me, no business executive trying to fleece me with promises of yet another and better model.

The general public unfortunately want no more of this caution, for them it's back to the good times.  The memory of overladened hospitals and the chaotic struggle to save lives is replaced by an image of cold beer and the heaving nightclub. I was never interested in the night club, it always seemed too groupie for my taste, too bouncy, too noisy, too lacking in self control but for the millennials it’s the place to be, especially with a couple of ecstasy tablets to keep you in the loving mood.

Love of course is a much misunderstood  word since to love a good book is very very  different from loving Mary at number 89. The satisfaction in finding a mental resting place, a place of refuge can be found in both but the pressure to get a good nights sleep is dependent on other factors. This juggling with outside influences, of trying to find a balance with what you are satisfied with and yet conscious that your sense of satisfaction sometimes falls far short and that the interaction between people outside your own mind is a minefield of of assumptions and wrong guesses. Even language lets us down when the tongue runs away down a wrong track and mistakes dialog with emotion.

How often we are forced into a cull de sac of contradictions, words and arguments meant for an intellectual discussion, now inappropriate and damaging, the same words, generalisations, habits of thought, are trotted out and can hurt the person who is mentally in a different place,  undoing something you never for a moment considered applied to the person you love.  

So love is, like the poets say, a delicate flower, often bruised, rarely watered or spoken about and yet containing more than half of our emotions. Given the rewards when we do get it right, perhaps we should make more of an effort.