Being alone can bring with it melancholy. Often this is regarded as an ailment. Sometimes it is. Especially when it never lifts. But what if it just involves catching on? I mean, people learn, through long experience, how life really is.
"Become active, get involved," people often tell you, as if more of the same is the cure. There is just the possibility that old people have the most realistic attitudes of all. They don't have a malady. Life has just taught them something.
Has anyone ever said, " I miss my illusions?" Don't think so, but illusions keep many "happy"--in a state of mind cushioned by lies. As I write this, it sounds so cynical.
I looked up the Cynics, starting with Diogenes and his barrel. Now I know I am one. They believed in the virtue of good works--of fighting with good. Hope I have done some.
A very happy world for me would be to have the dead--animals and people--restored to life. That would be the end of melancholy. I look forward to resurrection, to me the most precious promise in the Bible.
Even though I may be chronologically younger than you, I understand the melancholy of which you speak. Life is a scale of sorts and at the point at which more and more people and animals we love have moved on to Heaven, it gets harder to invest in the world the way that we once did. Perhaps this is simply God's way of allowing us as younger folk to invest fully in the world, only to allow us to reset our sights on Heaven in the second portion of our lives. I know I think of those I love in Heaven every day.
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