“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
All too often we are so consumed by the way people see us, that we allow fear to prevent us from outwardly expressing the importance of people in our lives. Given the brevity and unpredictability of life, we need to tell people what they mean to us when they are standing in front of us rather than only realizing a good thing when it’s gone. We need to focus on building deep connections rather than simply keeping them to a surfaced level.
“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
There’s a certain excitement about slipping under the radar at large gatherings and abundant affairs – everyone is so tuned into playing a part in the scene around them, that it’s easy to go unnoticed. In the midst of the many surfaced relationships that you are forced to maintain, slipping away to capture moments of intimacy with those we care deeply about is often irresistible.
“It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”
When we leave our perceptions of people, experiences and memories to our imaginations, we allow ourselves to twist and tangle them in every which way. But sometimes meeting new people or even the progression of time itself forces us to remove the fog that once clouded our vision, and allows us to see things for what they really are – and blatant reality is often more striking than we could have ever imagined.
“What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”
Often we find ourselves posing the question: am I doing this for me, for the sake of enjoying the moment? Or am I doing this for what will come out of everyone learning that I did it when today becomes tomorrow? While there are some things that we feel the need to do simply for the sake of doing them, we are likely to feel more personal fulfillment if we spend the majority of our time focused on living a fulfilling life in the moment, rather than creating the illusion of fulfillment with the stories that we tell (be them real or imaginary).
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”
Sometimes when we adore a person, we build them up in our own imaginations, so much so that even when we are entirely charmed by the person when they are finally standing in front of us, they may fall short of the pedestal that we’ve put them on in our own minds. While it is often impossible not to idolize people to a fault, it is sometimes healthy to remove ourselves just enough to present ourselves with a fair assessment of the situation.
“She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her.”
Knowledge is framed by one’s perception of what one knows, and often is entirely subjective. We find people intelligent when they know things that we don’t and when they have experienced different things than we have. Everyone knows or has experienced something that we have not, so we can truly learn something from everyone; we can also appear to be knowledgeable to another simply by realizing how we can differentiate ourselves.
