But many people are hostile to humanity most of the time. They swim in different waters, or perhaps are held captive under the sea.
Babies are born with hope, I suppose. By nature they suppose the best is possible, and for some, life–which is to say the people around them–teaches them to close themselves off, to suppress their human instincts towards sociality, towards caring, towards tenderness, and to both give and receive honest and heartfelt love.
What is the point of no return? Is there no hope for some people?
To be clear, I feel there is a great deal of hope for me, every reason for hope. I am confronting the deepest realities within me, and although the process and the vistas are unpleasant, SEEING what was there but hidden is invaluable and liberating.
But I have some specific people in mind, people I am witnessing going through changes, struggling with things in their lives which, compounded with what they brought from childhood, might sink them.
How do we turn evil to good? Perhaps this is the best way of putting this inchoate struggle I feel within me now. I often feel motion deep in the water, and it sometimes takes me a very, very long time to see what it is, and what it means.
Can there be a more profound question, though? Do we not all want to belong, to be in a shared humanity, and is it not those among us who cannot share this longing, because they don’t feel it is possible, who make it most hard to achieve this aim?
How do we save the lost? How can we bring them back, or show them a path home? These are important questions the modern world has done an exceptionally incompetent job of answering.
As usual, these things wrack me with pain and make me cry, but I’m long used to it. I can take much more than most people. I have an “unnatural” emotional pain tolerance. That comment by a therapist remains one of the best compliments I have ever received.