Three Beautiful Things 03/25/18: Pain Relief, The Warping Effects of Isolation, Family Dinner

1.  I continued to treat my left foot, especially the big toe area. It's improved. No longer wrathful, not even furious or raging, today my toe was vexed, annoyed maybe, with short periods of seething. My shoe slipped on more easily. I'm walking almost normally with a small limp. I'm not ready quite yet to take a long walk, but I'm relieved to be getting around more easily.

2. I've spent much of my adult life as a graduate student, instructor, and blogger thinking and writing about the ways loneliness and isolation erode the human spirit. Charles Dickens understands this core truth about human life deeply and beautifully and harrowingly. In my reading of Great Expectations today, the story about Miss Havisham reached its climax and what Miss Havisham experiences portrays as vividly as anything I've ever read the warping, distorting, and destructive impact of human isolation as we see the spiritual and physical consequences of Miss Havisham having walled herself off from nearly all human interaction. It doesn't matter whether this isolation is self-imposed, as it is with Miss Havisham, or is a result of aging, immobility, social shunning, poverty, or some other isolating fate one might suffer; it is suffocating, disorienting, and often deluding. We need one another.

The beauty of Charles Dickens' story telling is that he also explores and understands the nourishment of deep friendship and how social interaction and a sense of belonging can help sweeten human perspective. Friendships and being acquainted with different people can help deter the warping temptations of obsessiveness, single-mindedness, and living by the false lights of one's illusions -- even if it doesn't always.

3. Christy fixed beef steak fajitas for family dinner. They were mighty delicious. So were our conversations about all sorts of things ranging from the life and death of Troy Schueller, the pleasures of Charles Dickens, the use of the active and passive voice in writing and speaking English, Christy and Everett's infirm cat, Junebug, vehicles we have owned, physical therapy, the challenges of maintaining a specialized diet when attending a conference or a luncheon, the often slow and halting process of getting a career underway, and mechanical garage doors.  I returned home with a lot to contemplate.