Another Stranger

Now that I'm back at Mundane Mischief, I've been reflecting about the work I've done so far.  I reread some of my entries to see if I have returned with new perspective, and I have.  The truth is that Only A Real Elf is cowardly.  I am a person that believes in the possibility of the best, but assumes the worst.  The dark changes things, but what changes even more when night falls is that the curtain falls away revealing my hypocrisy.

I look back on my mission statement and I see how in many ways I am not yet a person strong enough to fulfill that endeavor.  I sit on the bus and I look at the people around me, I leave my headphones in my backpack.  I think about that woman in the very front who has the most delicate face, and I think about walking up to her and telling her. I think about that boy hanging off of the bus handle, reading a book so engrossing that he's willing to struggle against gravity and the sudden stops of the bus to continue reading.  I think about asking him what the book is about.  I look at them again and she looks tired, she wouldn't want to talk; he would probably think I was flirting, and he'd be annoyed that I disrupted his studies.  So, I reach into my backpack and I put on my headphones.  Someone asks to sit next to me, and I nod silently.  I do not make eye contact.

I know what must be done and yet I retreat into my shyness, into the dark autumn evenings, into my fear of what others think.  I see these strangers and I look at them with an artist's eye; I sculpt their past, and like Pygmalion, I fall in love.  But I also sculpt their tired, impatient looks, their fear, and their rejection of me. All of the observational powers that make me so curious and empathetic about strangers, are the very things that stop me.  Being a story- teller stops me.  To live Mundane Mischief you must be P'u, you must act as The Uncarved Block. 

It isn't the early sunsets that stop me; had I been doing this in Northern Alaska during June, that entry would have been about some other "obstacle".  This isn't about me facing strangers for their approval of what I believe in; this is about facing myself.  Who is this odd person that yearns for connectedness?

UPDATE: I guess that is what the title, "Learning To Love You More" really means.