LONELINESS IN OUR LAST STAGE HAS TO DO WITH OTHERS

-
A few years ago, due to my divorce, I moved from Coral Gables to Miami Beach. While living right on the beach by the sea brings me a lot of serenity and joy for life, the fact that in Miami Beach it’s very hard to make new friends annoys me. It was then that a former work colleague suggested introducing me to one of her friends who, coincidentally, lives very near me and is also from Argentina. After my colleague gave me her name and phone number, I sent her a text message and we both decided to meet for dinner at a nearby restaurant. While at this stage of my life I prefer to have lunch rather than dinner, my colleague's friend replied that she was very busy with work during the day and that having lunch was not an option for her. So we agreed to have dinner instead. On the day we were supposed to meet, I arrived at the restaurant a little early and decided to wait for my future friend while enjoying a glass of chilled white wine. And so half an hour went by without her showing up. I finally saw her crossing the street in front of the restaurant; she looked very irritated and without that smile we flash when we meet a future friend. Not only she could not figure out how to pay for the parking on her phone, but she also explained she was half an hour late because she had lost track of time playing Burako. Although showing up late for dinner because of Burako rather than work seemed a bit off to me, I let it slide. Finally, after the usual introductions, we decided to order food. Even though the restaurant owner is Argentine, the waiter we got was an American of Polish descent. He was a young guy, polite and very shy, but he seemed to do his job as best as he could. Since my future friend doesn’t speak English, she got annoyed when the waiter didn’t understand her order. So much so that, after ten minutes of talking to him, my future friend rudely told him to send an Argentine waitress to our table. Maybe if I were thirty years younger, I would have overlooked such a lack of respect toward the waiter to focus more on getting to know my new friend. But today when I'm many years older it is impossible for me to overlook the behavior of someone of an advanced age who still hasn't learned anything about life; respecting others is almost a commandment. When Jesus stated that we have to love others like we love ourselves what he really meant was that we have to respect others like we respect ourselves. After dinner I said goodbye to the woman, knowing beforehand that I would never see her again. This is why, for us who have lived countless years and learned what life is all about, it is hard to make new friends, and loneliness becomes our most faithful companion

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe". Galileo Galilei

-
I don't believe in religion because religion was fabricated by men, but I do believe in the Divinity of the Universe. I was always struck by those philosophers such as Galileo or Pythagoras who affirmed that, at its deepest level, reality is mathematical. In other words, ours is a Universe that works according to a predictable order, and whose eternal rules never change. As the years of my life went by, I began to look at the reality that surrounds us in a different way. While at first glance human relationships and life's conflicts seem complicated and difficult to understand, I realized that beneath of it all dwells an almost mathematical simplicity. For example, I have often heard of people who after having displayed for years a disrespectful attitude towards their environment, suddenly face misfortune. Likewise, there are others who from the outside seem to have it all, but suffer from a deep emptiness that pervades their entire life. On the other hand, there are those of...
Read more

THERE IS AN ANGEL AT EVERY CORNER

-
Image
  From my book CUENTOS DEL MÁS ACÁ Y DEL MÁS ALLÁ  (Amazon) It was in 2007 when I was about to move to Miami Beach after selling the house in Coral Gables where my ex-husband, my son and I had lived for many years. That year, the Portability Act had come out in Florida, allowing owners who moved to a new home to continue paying the same taxes of their sold residence and avoid paying the higher taxes of their new house. The news filled me with joy because since we had bought that house at a low price, its property taxes were also low; above all, the new law diminished my financial concerns as a divorced woman. Still, things were not as simple as I thought. When I went to sign the sale contract of my house, the buyer's lawyer pointed out to me that my name on the house deed was incorrect; they had written María instead of Marina. Although I am quite obsessive with forms and documents, for some reason I had never found the time to redo the deed when I should have. However, that d...
Read more

KNOW YOURSELF. LIFE WILL BE BETTER.

-
Image
  The famous Delphic maxim, Know Thyself , spread by Socrates and later by Plato in his writings, is also found in earlier philosophers. In the same way, we also notice it in philosophers of the modern era, and in Freud's theories of the unconscious. Although its syntax seems easy to understand, if we try to explain what this aphorism means, many of us will find the task difficult. Knowing oneself in depth is not an easy journey, especially because we do not really know what it is that we must know better. Since we tend to hide all that we dislike about ourselves in our unconscious, we are also inclined to concentrate on what is easy to detect. However, if we live our life with our intimate eyes closed, our relationships with the rest of the world will not last long. Many years ago, when I was much younger and knew almost nothing about psychology, I fell in love with a guy who, in one of our first intimate conversations, confessed that his mother was a hateful human being. Althoug...
Read more