Navigating Solutions and Darkness

Photo by  Mateus Campos Felipe  on  Unsplash "I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,“ said the man. ”You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides. " He waved his thin hand towards the city and walked over to the window. “A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back. “Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you mi...

Photo by  Katarzyna Modrzejewska  from  Pexels Rather than waste its time on hateful bigotry and petty violence, if only mankind devoted its time and energy to solving the more difficult problems of the soul. Such as how to handle and process rejection in a sane and rational manner. There are few on earth who haven't experienced the sting of feeling unwanted. It may be a passing pain, quickly overtaken by better emotions, or it may be a dreadful burden that weighs on the soul for decades. But no human is universally accepted - we are all disliked by someone or the other. Or perhaps not liked as much as we would prefer.  I have long bemoaned the despicable practice of turning on the one that rejected you, armed with insults and fury - a practice which has, as part of it, the concept of the friendzone. A section of society that seems to consist overwhelmingly of men attack viciously the objects of their affections once they have been turned down by them...