Shielding Ourselves From Others

How often I fail.

Sometimes it feels as it my personal life is just a series of failures as I sort of lurch from disaster to disaster.  You would not know this from looking on the outside, of course: you would just see me with my usual demeanor, laughing and carrying on as I try to get this thing accomplished or that thing done.  But inside it so often feels that there is a battlefield of choices and ideas going on, and too often I feel I am on the wrong side of them.

It makes me wonder what life would be like if the contents of our minds and hearts were as audible and visible as the expressions on our faces.  What would people think?  How the illusions we have of each other would be ripped away in the reality of how we actually go about our daily lives?

It gives me pause as to why God never gave us the gift of telepathy.  You would think that this would be an excellent thing - mind to mind instant contact in a way that would enable people to to truly know each other.  Instead we kind of wander through words and thoughts and actions, hoping that we both express what we are trying to express and not reveal the rest of it.  Perhaps the lack of telepathy is an outcome of The Fall, a privilege that we are now denied.  Or perhaps it is simply a protection God put into place to protect us from having to regularly engage others in an overwhelming assault of our selves.

I have often said - and believe - that a truly successful personal life would be the one in which my outer and inner selves are the same.   I sometimes wonder if that is really possible, if in fact the outer self helps to buffer others from what is truly going on inside of us.

To protect others from our own demons.  And shield us from our own failures.