few options remain

A man encourages his friends to purge their lives of sadness and hatred, but despite his best efforts, little positive change occurs. For his troubles, he is badmouthed and tattled on, ridiculed and mocked. He realizes his mistake and tries to keep his mouth shut, but it is too late – he stops voicing his opinion but gets yelled at for raising his eyebrows in what is seen as a rude and derogatory fashion. Keeping the area around his eyes as neutral as possible, he tries to free his mind of the hatred boiling around him by breathing out the stress, anger, and malcontentedness he hears spewing from his quasi-adoptive family. Its mother yells at him only occasionally, but, in her anger, she reveals that she has been keeping track of his every transgression, repeating them to herself over and over until they erupt as violent and uncontrollable rage.

It has reached the point where his breathing insults the matriarch – she just recently accused him of belittling her by exhaling disdainfully while she was listing her mother's past failures and speaking poorly about her supposedly best friend. If he tries to ignore the woman's negativity and not listen to the sadnesses she repeats, she yells at him for not listening to her and scolds him for ignoring everything she says. He has been backed into a corner; few options remain. If he keeps spending time with them, he shall have to be very careful of the way he speaks, looks, and breathes, lest someone take affront to his actions. If he continues coming around, he shall have to choose between sitting stone-faced and mute with neutral body-language and a mind free of both attachment and aversion or grinning with abject glee at everything that is said and shouting approvingly at even the slightest move, nod, glance, smile, and blink.

He prefers neither option: he shall simply stay away and stop hanging with the family in question; he would rather spend his life in quiet and honest solitude than in loud company that simmers with anguished self-deception. If one lives life enslaved to the demands of the ego, if one cannot evaluate oneself honestly at regular intervals, if one prefers the stupor of ignorance to the clarity that humility affords, then one will have a hard time adapting to the changing realities of life, preferring holding on to letting go, closing off to throwing open, shedding tears of rage to those of joy. At some point, one must weigh the benefits of human interaction against those of solitude, and if the stress and sadness that comes from hanging out with certain people is greater than the joy and contentedness their presence affords, one stays away. The main lesson the author has learned is that no matter what he says or how hard he tries, he cannot save other people from their own egos, change the way they interpret life events, or influence them in a positive manner. He heard a saying recently, one that has stuck with him: If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. It is time to find a new room.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥