Beatrice and Bert
Doing it to ourselves
I have a visual. A photo? Sort of, taken by the imagination. Raina Telgemeier’s graphic mind. One visual worth a thousand words. And another book, by Susanne Degges-White, Toxic Friendships: Knowing the Rules and Dealing with the Friends Who Break Them. Where’s the visual? In your mind. Imagine we’re looking at a personification. What do you mean? The ideas I talk about in “The Role of Guidance Questioning in the Management of Tension,” visualized as a person. We’re looking at a person? Yes.
Go on. The person is the nicest. Everything good from the front. But here’s where Susanne’s book comes in. This nice person . . . Does she have a name? Beatrice. Who’s that? Norton’s squeeze, but never mind. Call her anything. Beatrice is standing on a pivot. Which makes it possible to do something we can’t do with each other but it would be helpful if we could. What? Spin her around in the opposite direction so we can get a good look at her back side. Her ass? Her back side. Where did you learn to talk like that? From you putting words in my mouth.
Her toxic side, because this is the personification of the ideas in my essay. Of the emergence of a Self from a primordial soup of ideas, conditions that coalesced spontaneously into the origin of everything conceived and conceivable about ‘creation’. Accompanied by its reverse-opposite. Negativity. Yes. A re-action to the positivity of action that was forward movement. No-movement. No-everything that I’ve characterized as ‘make-believe’. Bert Park’s Miss America beauty pageant, a fantasy concocted of makeup and poses. Appearances meant to disguise the nature of negativity. To make fools of all who fall for them. A virtual reality of toxicity populated by toxic personalities we must learn to deal with.
You’re picturing the original personality so I won’t make a fool of myself. Yes. So you’ll understand the nature of ‘person’, that though it’s two-sided and the two sides are opposites, they’re still one person. Important because? When toxicity intrudes into friendships – into any relationship – it isn’t from another person. Nothing is from ‘another person’. It’s us being tested by our own back sides. Character being tested by its own reverse-opposite. If we allow ourselves to descend into hurt and resentments, rage and hatred, we’re doing it to ourselves.
The big lie
We have a choice. We can choose to take toxicity on as though it were malevolent. On its own terms, as though it were actually an ‘enemy’ intent on harming us. Or do what Edith Eger did, the Holocaust survivor and author of The Choice: Embrace the Possible: choose not to be fooled. To recognize Beatrice and respond to her instead of ‘recognizing’ what can’t be recognized because it’s made up. Bert and his magic kingdom of make-believe. An ‘enemy’ that’s nothing but appearances. Whereas Beatrice is honest, friendly, and rational. Still imagined as ‘another person’ but it’s what we’re conditioned to do. From childbirth, to accept virtual reality as reality and make our way from there, conditioned to recognize and conceive of our psychological as well as our physical environment in physical forms. Objects separate from us that in fact aren’t separate. They’re subjects, part of us.
The illogic of Bert’s make-believe is the mad idea behind the self-appointed ‘invader’ and its ‘invasion’, that it’s an ‘other’ and ‘other’ is an enemy. A divider to be attacked and defended against.
When Love and Logic are uniters who came together to form the original Mind-as-Relationship and to Parent their Child Guidance-as-questioning. To form the original pattern for Creation, a coalescence of conditions whose controlling consideration was Integration and defining Act was Spontaneity. Neither of which allows any room for ‘other’ let alone ‘enemy’.
It’s all of one piece: Self-Awareness that includes its reverse-reflection. The original Mind-Relationship that’s relational by definition and can’t be paired off with a separate self. The pairing off is with itself in reverse. The impossibility that ‘possibility’ isn’t. A requirement of Logic to complete the function of definition, an implication attached to an idea. Incapable of being divided from its host idea. Incapable of association with a separate idea. Impossibilities.
The illogic of Bert’s make-believe dramatized by an ‘end-of-days’ battle between the forces of good and evil on the plains of Armageddon. One side of one Self fighting the other to the death. As if one body flailing at itself with one arm attacking and the other defending were capable of a ‘glorious victory’. The big lie, that our reverse-reflection is an ‘other’ draws us into harm self-inflicted by fear and suspicion. The psychology of tribalism. Of racism that should have been discredited for all time by World War II and the Holocaust but evidently wasn’t. The psychology of victimhood – divided-wounded Psyches. Self-debasement. Corruption perpetuated instead of erased by hierarchical, herd-mentality religion.
Getting it wrong
Arrogance built into the DNA of the animal kingdom, the illogic of Bert’s make-believe. The demand of every rung of hierarchy’s ladder that its ass be kissed by the lower rung. Until the highest rung can fantasize that all the ass-kissing in its realm is its rightful due. That there’s no limit on what it can demand — the right to absolute obedience. Or on the cruelty that will come to those who refuse — the absolute right to condemn and punish disobedience.
The presumed ‘right’ of indivisibility. The Bert side of Beatrice, a stable of Marvel Universe action-heroes flexing their muscles, so compelling that some personality types readily identify with them. Choose to play the parts of negativity – what isn’t – in virtual reality. Beatrice’s ass. Yes, instead of what is – Beatrice. Why? So Beatrice will be what arrogance wants her to be: a permanent invitation for her ass to be kissed. The bigger ape.
The big lie that the back side of Reality is Real instead of the reverse mirror-image reflection that it is. That it’s really ‘there’ when there is no ‘there’ there. What there ‘is’ instead is make-believe arrogance that can’t do anything right. Incompletion that can’t complete, negative that can’t be positive, implication that can’t be the thought that implied it. A derivative. Second banana with but one incomparable talent, for chaos. Making a mess of things. Not-pattern. Reversing one possibility into a pile of impossibilities. One sequitur into a string of non-sequiturs. One version into a string of per-versions. For which, being arrogant and completely nuts, it takes great pride.
What do all these lies mean? That the templates and paradigms that rule human-animal inquiry have it wrong. Why? Because professions require that their practitioners adhere to the protocols of body-tribal idolatry. The ruling ethos of virtual reality set in concrete by sensory perception. Set in mud because it’s the original stick-in-the-mud. Make-believe’s first line of defense against movement, change, and progress. Against Character, Integrity, Free Choice, and Self-Awareness. Against Child Guidance-questioning assuming its Function in Reality. The eyes with which we can see what’s not there but not what’s there. Blindness. The Mind with which we think that’s not in its right mind. Self-unawareness.
Determination
Guidance can manage the tension between what is and what isn’t, between reality and appearances in its role of questioning. It can do so so long as the arrogance of make-believe appearances doesn’t provoke its own divider reverse-reflection into dividing itself. Doesn’t manipulate its two-part definition into redefining it to resemble itself – who Guidance isn’t. The ultimate aim of arrogance: to convert its victims into versions of itself.
We can’t guide while we’re flooded with feelings from our own make-believe reverse sides. From our own arrogance, when our emotions are taken captive by our reverse-opposite. Mistaking them for an assault by ‘other’ when there are no ‘others’. No separate-divided selves other than ourselves. Even though in make-believe’s kingdom of ‘others’ – of appearances – it seems like it. Our metaphysical Self is hallucinating and we can choose not to be part of the hallucination.
Child Guidance-questioning in training, that’s Mind self-unaware hallucinating virtual reality, is susceptible to influence by one voice from make-believe and another from Definition, its source in Reality. The former disrespectful and manipulative, the latter respectful and informative. Depending on which voice is heard figures in the dream will be guided from within by an independent intelligence or they’ll move in unison this way and that, like cattle hearing a call back to the barn. Social media monitor these movements as do elections. Suggesting that whether individuals are aware of it their minds are linked to the dreamer’s Mind. That their thoughts and feelings aren’t entirely their own. Moving in unison according to the direction of the dreamer’s thoughts and feelings. Deterministically.
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Practical Use
Weapons of self-destruction
Mass ideologies are another way that deterministic herd mentality asserts itself. When the choice of ‘leaders’ is the choice of surrogates for a split Mind. The dreamer behind the ‘virtual’ of virtual reality. Chosen by personality types so thoroughly captive to Bert’s know-it-all ‘creator’ that they equate them with supernatural entities qualified thus to lead the herd around. Concerned with power alone. Unfailingly authoritarian, who won’t flinch at extreme acts of will if they’re signs of indivisibility, supremacy beyond questioning. At extreme acts of cruelty. By deterministic herd mentality’s idea of ‘God’. Determination’s “triumph of the will.” Totalitarian dictatorship.
Plato and predecessors who influenced his thinking, Socrates and Parmenides, distinguished between ideas and forms or matter and questioned whether the latter could be real. Mind was their guide: Logic and Reasoning. Aristotle and his successors, physicists like Einstein and quantum-gravity theorists like Carlo Rovelli, didn’t question whether the latter could be real. Matter was their subject and guide: bodies, brains, their five senses: taste, touch, smell, vision, and hearing, and the material surroundings they sensed. The instruments of science and its ‘iron rule’ of ‘objectivity’.
Yet today, after centuries of study, the ‘iron’ in scientific ‘objectivity’ is showing some give. Science questioning, as the theorist-historian Adam Becker has done in Scientific American, whether Parmenides was right. Whether matter is in some sense, illusory.
Are Aristotle’s successors coming to the same conclusion as Plato and his predecessors? The human-animal Psyche contaminated by make-believe – indivisible, negative, and inaccessible – takes no note of either questioning or its conclusion. Resists inquiry, learning, and awareness. Reverses movement, evolution, and progress. Blocks insight, intuition, and understanding. Preserves and protects make-believe against all threats of contradiction from Mind. Stands up not against arrogance but for it. The will of things to be what they aren’t: illusory. The magic acts of appearances and facades: lies, deceptions, and manipulations. Weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of self-destruction.
A head start
How can I put our visual to practical everyday use? Beatrice and her reverse-opposite Bert. One way, by conscious recognition of what Edith intuited about Bert, that though he and his cruelty appear to be a whole, separate person they are not. They are but one side of a two-sided Person. The side that’s not who the Person really is but their reverse. Which means that the side presented to you is a façade. And if this is true then you will realize that relating to it isn’t possible. The appearance and its negativity aren’t really there. Aren’t real at all.
This being so, attempting to relate to the façade as opposed to their other side would snare Br’er Rabbit in a briar patch. Would entangle you in a maze of contradictions that might seem at times to offer glimmers of hope but only lead to despair. To more entanglements and frustration until your own reverse-façade intrudes and there’s nothing of ‘relationship’ left but negativity. Two personalities who might once have seemed like friends reduced to ‘enemies’.
I can put our visual to practical use by taking the presence of Bert as a signal to absent myself. Psychologically and emotionally if it can’t be done physically, as it couldn’t be done by Edith at Auschwitz. To be ‘there’ mentally only enough to deflect toxicity for self-protection. Should there be an opportunity or necessity to disable toxicity for protection – yours and/or others’ – this will present choice of another kind. Not whether to evade Bert but how to confront him. How to eliminate an incidence of toxicity even though toxicity itself can’t be eliminated. Even though eradication of evil is no more possible than dividing indivisibility. When possibility is limited to Martin Brody taking out a single mechanical shark with one well-aimed rifle shot.
The way to do it as much a test of ingenuity as of Character. The ability to size up a situation from different perspectives and to choose logically which one makes the best fit. Which one will deliver the desired result: a test of self-awareness positioned to question situations proactively and constructively rather than conditioned to accept things the way they are passively. To take the path of least resistance, when to do so adds to toxicity. Our visual gives us a head start on avoiding situations that can only waste us in briar patches.
Work to do
We are challenged by toxicity in virtual reality sometimes to respond to its presence not with absence but with our own presence. Our Beatrice, forthrightly determined to disable it by whatever means necessary to prevent harm short of spinning herself back into Bert. A concession to the ‘reality’ of virtual reality even though we are aware that our ‘enemy’ is a mischaracterization. Isn’t what it appears to be, a real-life monster deserving reciprocation of its own brutality. A dose of its own medicine. The reason why the Confederate general Robert E. Lee declined to refer to his Union opponents in any but respectful terms. Because before the war he’d been one of them, knew them for friends and colleagues. Persons like himself and not inhuman beasts to be demonized.
It’s the reason why we can refuse to drag ourselves down into the morass of toxicity when we know from personal experience that it has another side and it’s not a beast. Even though the cause we’re about is to disable it for the protection of its victims.
Why do circumstances bring us to such a choice? Because of the nature of our species and the state of ‘reality’ here on Earth. That Self that’s Reality can’t be any kind of ‘species’ and Reality that’s Self-Awareness can’t be any kind of self-unawareness in virtual reality. Circumstances that put a premium on awareness when all is Movement. All is evolution that won’t excuse us from situations that call for getting it right from Character with Integrity. From Choice determined to be Free. Until we learn what we’re here to learn. Until we earn promotion to Life where Reality isn’t virtual and we’re the protection not the beast.
Beatrice and Bert can be of practical use whenever toxicity intrudes and we remember that it isn’t an image of someone else in need of correction. It’s another side of us. A portrayal not only of who we happen to be in this life but the work we have to do. To distinguish between front and back. Between Character and mischaracterization, Real and façade, and to deal with façade accordingly. As our friend Guidance and our metaphysical Parents would have us do. The Self-Awareness of Love and Logic. The Conscience of Creation.
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Instant Replay
Just a touch of vermouth
Questioning smooths the waters between one side of tension and the other. Improves things but it’s not able to reconcile one side with the other. It can’t make the pressure go away altogether. What would it be like if there weren’t anyone to guide? Like the inside of a Divided Airlines flight. Pilot and co-pilot not getting along. Passengers at each other’s throats. At least with United Airlines you’ve got a flight attendant soothing frayed nerves. Guidance is a flight attendant? Well, think of how you’d feel if there was no one to greet you at the end of the jetway. No one to make things pleasant while you’re crammed into a tube like a bunch of sardines and wave goodbye when you leave. Flight attendants are pretty comforting when you think about it.
Ah! You’ve got a job with the flight attendants’ union. I knew it! I’m a questioner and that’s what Guidance does. Question. I’ll bite — Why? The answer to this Why turns out to be the answer to a lot of Whys. ‘Answer’ is arrogance, for one. If the enumerator were 21 there really would be one big answer at the beginning. What are you trying to say? That if we imagine ourselves observing what went on at the beginning of everything we would see that it couldn’t be everything taken into account, everything settled and static. Like once and done.
Why not? Sounds reasonable to me. It’s not. It’s the very source of irrationality as well as arrogance, because . . . Timeout! Haven’t we heard this before? If it sounds ‘reasonable’ then I may have said something like this before but I didn’t get it across. You didn’t hear it. Maybe I did and we can talk about something important, like what’s trending on Instagram. Then what did I get across? Uh. . . it’s on the tip of my tongue. . . Something to do with the way things are, right? Don’t give me any hints. I just need time to clear my thoughts. Here, have an Alfred Dunhill. Need a light? No. I need a drink.
Going deep
Everything about the idea that there was one big answer to everything at the beginning is ILLOGICAL. ABSURD. Why? If it were true WE WOULDN’T BE ASKING THE QUESTION. If it were true the way things are would be knowledge – everything there is to be known is known. Everything there is to be is already here. Is ‘been’, and so the idea of awareness itself would be irrelevant since there’s no possibility of unawareness. Everything what it is with no possibility of not being what it is. One-dimensional for having no depth, one-sided for having no breadth. No internal, just one external. There being no conditions to explain it but one: it’s ‘there’. If it’s there-ness then we can’t be ‘here’ wondering about it. What need would there-ness have for anyone else anyway? For life or creation if it’s all there and done?
Tune in tomorrow for another episode of . . . There would be no more episodes. No more storylines to extend between commercial breaks because what need would there-ness have for Mind if it has the field covered already? If every possible plot has already been played out and the characters written out? I’m trying to get across a conception that’s inconceivable to the human Psyche that’s accustomed to thinking. BUT NOT TO THE HUMAN PSYCHE THAT’S OPPOSED TO THINKING. Whoa! We’re going deep here! The novelist William Styron ridiculed other writers like Norman Mailer and James Jones of his generation for ‘going deep’. I would too, but not because they were trying. It’s because they weren’t going deep enough. All that herd mentality can detect is its own image coming from another pasture.
Then what do you mean ‘opposed to thinking’? When we get a clear look at illogic on one side of the beginning and the conditions that brought us about that couldn’t have been illogical it gives us an insight into what’s going on inside people’s heads. Inside the human-animal Psyche that’s causing a lot of grief. Maybe causing all of it. What conditions? Contrast with the idea of ‘absolute.’ ‘Absolute’ being an attribute of one big answer. The ‘indivisibility’ I’ve written about that’s not-Mind. Not possibility, when it’s obvious that what isn’t illogical is everything conceivable as ‘creativity’. Having different levels and sides of awareness – depth perception, peripheral vision. Being able to see within as well as without, around us as well as what’s in front of us.
The boob in Washington
You’re describing different personality types. Yes, and if you’re aware of it, it means your own type is maturing. Growing up. Developing. If you aren’t it could mean you’re the type that’s influenced more by the not-Mind arrogance side of the template than the other.
What do you mean by ‘template’? When we go back to the beginning we’re maybe dabbling in abstractions for our amusement. To speculate on stuff that got people in the past to tell the stories of their tribes or species. All kinds of fanciful things like the sun being pulled across the sky by a tribe of native Americans. The “Book of Genesis” no less fanciful for postulating that there was this thing called ‘God’, it was a ‘he’, ‘he’ was the ‘word’, and the ‘word’ willed there to be light and all that came after. Nothing more than a guy with a beard on a mountaintop wielding some sort of magic. Zeus and his thunderbolts. Mythology.
Tribal authorities – herd mentality – motivated to enshrine obedience to authority in the Psyches of their followers but not to really understand anything. ‘God’ is authority. ‘God’ is ‘supreme,’ so best to be ‘God-fearing’ and do what you’re told. A template for letting arrogance get away with its absurdities and injustices. Very much a factor in human-animal dysfunction today with its ‘five-factor’ personality type theory, that steers the unawares toward ‘agreeability’. And many other sources out there given free license to make mischief by the unthinking. Cult followers who make a point of letting someone else do their thinking for them. Like who? Someone who stands for not-thinking. Not-awareness. Insensitivity and cruelty. Arrogance. Not-Mind. Could it be the boob at the head of the booboisie in Washington?
Alchemy
We can assume that this and all our situations are happenstance. Coming and going in no particular order, when this can’t be true if things have beginnings. The one big answer model says it’s absolute and has no need for limits. The limits of beginnings and endings, and so it’s just ‘there’. Has no need for Mind to define it either, which would put limits on what it is and what it does. Since it doesn’t do anything what need is there for definition? If it doesn’t need definition what need is there for Mind to define it? If things do have beginnings then what comes after bears the imprint of what came before. Our ancestors came before, right? Yes, and we bear the imprint of our ancestors. How? In our personalities.
The personality types of our forebears and their conditions form a template from which our types evolve. It’s unavoidable. And if the situation at the beginning was not-Mind — illogic and arrogance on one side, unevolved and unevolving — and conditions on the other that form a contrast – all things Mind, Love and Logic being nice and evolving – then this is a template. For everything including our ancestors’ and our own personality types and for what goes on within and among us. For perspectives open to different possibilities, different ways of looking at things and doing things, and for mindsets closed to all of that. Reflections of the contrast built into the original template.
The bogus ‘there’ may not be there but the template is definitely here and it’s Now. Forces at work within the human Psyche, conscious and sub-conscious, that trace all the way back to the beginning. Beyond ape. Beyond our metaphysical Self that’s a function of Creation in need of training. Beyond even its metaphysical Parents who were part of the beginning. But to the conditions that made the beginning possible.
Not one guy affecting ‘wisdom’ with a beard. Not one guru babbling mystical inanities from atop a mountain nor an extension of a magic wand. A disembodied hand of ‘fate’. But a mix of ideas that coalesced spontaneously to make something happen. To produce a product that bears the imprint of its ingredients. Like any one of us, mixtures of personality ingredients that coalesced around types by what process of alchemy we’ll never know.
How things happen
Why can’t we know? Because to ‘know’ is to share an attribute of the big answer, an ingredient of arrogance. Insensitivity and cruelty that assumes that it alone ‘exists’, and if there’s movement then it belongs to its ‘creation’. Which being lifeless is but an extension of arrogance: the idea of property. The idea of subjugation built into ‘domain’: no distinction between property and whatever occupies it. If it’s ‘there’ then I own it. Right. And if you own it you possess it and can do whatever you want with it.
The process I describe, of spontaneous coalescence, not only sets itself off in contrast with the know-it-all who fashioned its limitless big answer — the illogical ‘there’ that can’t be there. It sets itself off in contrast with the basic assumptions of human-animal inquiry. What do you mean? That the templates that Sapiens has fashioned for itself, to explain the way things are and how to go about the everyday business of life, are wrong. That we’re trying to get along with one another in shared enterprises misguided rather than guided.
Thinking about our origin and purpose in terms of bodies and tribes gets us nowhere. Arnold Toynbee did so famously with his voluminous Study of History and all he could extract from it was a formula: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The suggestion of an insight that barely pricked the surface of life’s meaning. Like The Urantia Book, a chronicle of the comings and goings of tribes, fit subject for entomology. Bugs crawling over the surface of an object.
At every turn we’re assuming that answers are ultimately what we will them to be and not what they are. That one way or the other there must be authority at the top of hierarchy where the buck stops. Where things happen, when this is exactly wrong. It is not how things happen. So long as we persist in thinking so ‘happening’ will continue to be what it is: mistakes and dysfunction. Acts of misguided willfulness interspersed with conditions that coalesce fortuitously in spite of themselves.
Condemned to ambivalence
What acts? Like interference in measures needed to mitigate the hazards of dependence on fossil fuels. What fortuitous coalescences? Any shift in voter sentiment that replaces arrogance with common sense in public office. On a personal level? Indivisibility that blocks relationships at a personal level as opposed to a tribal level. Wisdom and compassion among persons not so afflicted, that enables families to be there for one another. The former a manipulation that’s an act of will; the latter the consequence of Spontaneity for which we can be thankful but can never explain.
Each side of the original template has attributes. Properties that play off of one another because they’re interrelated. Both parts of the same question for which there can only be one correct Understanding. The way things are can’t be one big static answer in the presence of Movement or its contradiction. But tell that to the know-it-all. Yes. One big answer plus one big contradiction. That wants us to believe that it not only ‘exists’ — that it’s OK if Reality contradicts itself — but it also came before the thing that it contradicts. That negativity precedes positivity in the sequence of Logic. An absurdity that’s alive and well in the human Psyche.
The properties that become evident when we contemplate our template – the situation at the beginning – become evident way beyond the scope of an academic exercise. Our everyday experience is shot through with them. Our efforts to relate and to achieve, to grow and to apply our talents, are helped or hindered by them. By two sides of the same entity that envelops and accounts for everything that happens. By Mind. Whether it’s conditions coalescing from the bottom up and inside out – the way it is — or an absurdity: a what-isn’t derived from the same Mind that is. Negativity derived in reverse from positivity. Undefinable impossibilities derived from possibilities. Either way implications that never stop. Ideas that can be taken seriously and ideas that can’t.
To be sorted out correctly when their properties are understood, incorrectly when they’re not. Getting our paradigm wrong extends our dysfunction indefinitely. At both levels, tribal and personal. Paradigm? Where thinking takes us from our templates. What we make of them – their meaning. Failure to grasp the choices inherent in the situation at the beginning condemns us to patterns of indecision, between arrogance and respect, cruelty and kindness, willfulness and Spontaneity, wildness and Order. Condemns us to ambivalence in response to ambiguity. Of not-choices or wrong choices that keep alive the absurdity of the big answer and the ignorance and insensitivity, the nihilism and cruelty, of know-it-all arrogance.
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Plastics!
Two lessons
Why does it matter to you? The coalescence of conditions that brought me into this life – my template – positions me to question the way things are. To make an issue of what I perceive to be the lies and injustices of appearances. A natural enough role to assume since it’s appearances that make up the ‘virtual’ in virtual reality.
My paradigm at the moment, based on two lessons of broader significance:
- Not to be misguided by socially-accepted paradigms of the way things are that get it wrong and accelerate rather than inhibit pressures toward compromising individual integrity and corrupting public policy. That add to the chaos of fear and suspicion. That allow personality types captive to make-believe’s false promises to interfere with our lives, cross our boundaries, and imprison us in their own psychological cages. To impose the same rule of arrogance on us that King George imposed on the American colonies. With the same result: conflict. Violence done to both sides that was entirely preventable had they understood the nature of make-believe.
- Once we learn, as Edith did, how to deal with it and how not to deal with it for outer as well as for inner peace. Becoming accustomed to distinguishing between the toxic personality mask and the person behind the mask potentially helps to free the person from their toxicity. But whether it does or not it can be effective at preventing our own toxicity. At freeing us up to lead useful lives as it did Edith, a Holocaust survivor who could easily have been devastated by it.
Prove me right!
As the distinction has done to many who could have been devastated by their situations but weren’t. Still able to greet one another from a personal distance. Estranged, yet with waves and smiles, their free spirits of Mind and heart intact and Love undiminished. Examples that their descendants may someday want to emulate or may not, but their forebears need to set.
Arrogance wants to make everyone’s story its own. It didn’t succeed with you. No. And it won’t succeed with you either. You’re done with one phase of life and heading into another. What does Guidance have for me to think about now? Plastics! What? The advice Benjamin Braddock was given — Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. Never mind. Go forth and prove me right.