Does a Black Cat See His Own Reflection

There are over seven billion of us currently alive here on The Big Blue Marble. I don't pretend to know the quality of those lives, though I suspect there are peaks and valleys amongst and betwixt and a fair number of 'doing okay" folks mingled throughout the population

I didn't conduct a survey or graph a trend on that response based on counting the answers to my favorite casual questions, 'how's it going? or it's separated at birth parsed twin 'how are you doing?" mainly because these are space and time fillers. We don't listen to each other when we answer those questions and rarely actually listen to each other when asking them. It's a dance routine, a verbal hokey-pokey and we turn ourselves about.

Point in fact, suggests more and more writing from behaviorists, sociologists and communications specialists, despite having technological wonders to serve as threads to bind us to one another and to the fabric of our society, we are more alone than at any time in recorded history. Read this by Stephen Marche in The Atlantic (my very favorite magazine of all time) and see if you don't agree with more of his points rather than fewer.  

That I'm sharing it in this form and through this venue sort of proves his point, and saves us both a lot of face to face awkwardness, me especially. The ankle bracelet goes off when I leave the county and the judge says if he catches me out on the street again without the required international emergency orange protective vest walking at least twenty paces behind the flagman with the siren, he's revoking bail and taking away my birthday. I've got a feeling this is the year for the pony ride so I am treading carefully.

But kidding aside (and that's what most of the above paragraph was), instead of recognizing how often we are all in the same boat, we decry the size of the ocean. Or like Hamlet, be bound in a nutshell and never recognize the beauty of this world with which we have surrounded ourselves as we continue shuffling along with the lost and remaining lost in the shuffle.
-bill kenny