Seneca: Should we settle for "second best"???
Dear .Just prior to heading out the door for the twenty-minute trudge to my workplace, I've been sitting here, on the floor, sipping lemon tea, listening to a heavily syncopated 40 year-old jazz recording by Dave Brubeck, glancing outside to the fast-growing bulbs in my balcony planter...and thinking of YOU, specifically the offbeat playfulness of your mind.
As really tough as it is for x people to find a reliable, attractive, faithful, honest, patient and cheerful partner, I can imagine how tough it is for you to be alone much of the time. The strength that it takes for you to bear such an onerous yet perpetually unspoken burden must be inwardly excruciating. But I hugely respect and admire your pluck in doing your best to remain true to yourself and your hopes for a better life and ultimate emotional fulfillment.
I, too, am daily lonely, feeling oddly incomplete as though my other half were missing and yet when I look in the mirror each morning I outwardly seem to be whole, not half. But that's the trouble with unduly trusting in appearances...they can reassure one when in fact the inner reality is incomplete and inchoate.
My reading today has been the ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca, whose essays and letters are tersely worded gems of wisdom that remain fully apropos today. Technology and the cyber-world have done little or nothing to advance common sense or true wisdom about the folly of overly trusting in riches, or outer beauty, or high positions. Inner beauty and iner integrity are all that really abides...
Seneca says that we all tend to settle for the cheap, the tawdry, the easy-to-get, the outwardly showy or flashy. We tend to lack the stamina and the immense patience that it takes to wait for the truly wondrous, the inwardly marvelous, the magnificently lovely inner beauty that some few people carry about unseen by others.
When I think of your winsome, inquisitive character, I find myself hoping that you'll someday find a person that matches you virtue for virtue, grace for grace, instead of quickly settling on the nearest "easy sex" partner. You DESERVE the best...please keep serarching for it!!!
What a true gem you are!!! I am so very happy to be your friend, if only from afar, on this moist, emerald-green island of manila.
Wistfully, Your Doting Friend,
"pat"
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