A Normal Society

Musings with Old Friends : IX

I write in response to the comments I received from my friends regarding the difficulties encountered in a life of isolation and the subsequent adjustment to society. Its a phenomenon that affects a great many of us whether or not we choose a deliberate isolation for a period of time.

The man who is discharged from the mental institution may find that everybody in the world is in some ways unbalanced on account of prejudices and bias. He may then realize that he may be making too much of a thing about himself because he is just fussy.

Returning soldiers from the combat fields are in a state of condition of having been isolated, especially with regards to the fear of injury and loss of life. They too make the adjustment to the experience of normal society and are often confronted with the inquiry about what is normal.

The monks, yogis and nuns who spend time in monasteries, isolated from mainstream society normally return wearing a saffron robe of some kind and find their placement back in society as the one everybody relies upon in some way. A person must wonder about what it means to return to society simply with the blue jeans and T-shirt we are wearing and go see movies, shop at the mall and speak to old friends at the cafe.

It appears that anybody taking a particular exception to their behavior in society is a person who is particular about caring much but may need to be a bit more sensible. In such cases they come to realize that it is what they think about themselves that helps them with their adjustment to what they consider is normal in society.

In such an event, they need a yardstick about themselves, perhaps to relate to their best and worst moments and to compare that with the highs and lows of the average experience in society. Thereafter they may well intuit the fact that everybody in society is doing the same about themselves.

Reviews

[patricia]

ps. as for the social anorexia, i believe that kind of gets set in stone, before the age of seven, and that people tend to live in later life very much as they did at that young age, if their parent were emotionally absent through illness or addiction, or some other reason, maybe an only child...or something.

[patricia]

The question of isolation here discussed i feel goes far deeper in some people than this, often there is the genuine fear of intimacy, a kind of social anorexia, that people don't realy want to give up though they exhibit all the neediness and desire to be so called normal.
I totally agree that there is no such thing as normal, but we will always live in a society where people just some as ok and others as not ok, like you say, it is a sure sign of their own denial.
Enjoyed.