The Lone Wolf

It’s not easy, being alone.

You might believe that you meet strangers every single day in the course of your life.

Yet with few exceptions, every single person you encounter in your life has been known to you before.
There are the handful you meet and feel as if you’ve known your whole life within five minutes of chatting.

There are some you probably wish were strangers. You know the ones; always trailing chaos and expecting you to clean up after them.

There are those it takes some time to get to know, either because you are reticent to warm up to anyone quickly due to previous bad experiences, or because they are. Sometimes both contribute to you not getting to know someone for years… until that one aha moment where you look at one another with new eyes, perhaps a bit stricken that all this time you were lying under one another’s nose.

But there are few strangers you’ll meet in your lifetime.

Interestingly enough, their very scarcity makes them function somewhat like lone wolves in your life. You might escape feeling a bit uneasy that you couldn’t seem to find a natural rhythm or connection with these strangers, but that is all. There’s no lasting or negative effect on your self esteem or confidence.

It gets trickier the closer the lone wolf is positioned to you, however.

There’s a lack of harmony from the beginning. Communication can be harsh, jarring, discordant. The stranger will start a sentence before you’re finished with yours, and about a different topic altogether. They will look at you, eyes wide, wondering why on earth they just can’t seem to find the right key to lock regular, normal social interaction with you.

It doesn’t occur to them that they’ve never met you before.

Finding a lone wolf in the midst of your family is vastly more complicated. More mothers and fathers have worried, fretted, and suffered from constant guilt because they didn’t connect with one of their children than I can count.

Society tells us we must love our children with an overpowering love; that their every move should be cherished by us and we should feel a mystical, almost instant connection, with them from the moment they are born. Yet these parents struggle to forge that bond with their child. If this applies to you, there is a golden lining to what might otherwise seem a dark cloud; it’s your child’s first lifetime with you, too.

Rather than creating pressure, this should take it off. It’s a new beginning for each party involved, so the freedom to create the best of an awkward situation by simply being yourselves and getting to know one another for whatever time you choose to spend with one another is often best.

We are so often placed in the life of someone for such a brief period of time that the best thing we can all learn to do is appreciate them while they are there.

© Leah 
Date: 13-12-'17

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