There is a pile of ever-present dirt in the back left corner of my property. A self-replenishing pile, it is, and forever will be, there. Remove a spadesful and another spadesful joins the party. The party being the proverbial dirt pile that sits in the back left corner of my property.
The man stares out of his window at this dirt pile, and he tries, more than anything, to forge a connection between the inanimate lump of soil particles and his deepest thoughts. Forging as if furnaces were belching hot air right into his face. His cheeks have gone ruddy, and he is sweating profusely.
It is no easy thing developing an emotional connection with a pile of dirt. But rather surprisingly, it is not for the nature of the action being so absurd that it is hard. Rather it is hard because of the man’s conditioning. The man is conditioned to be wary, not to trust, never to fall into the trap of caring too much, for only one thing could be worse than developing a very real emotional connection to a pile of dirt in the back left corner of one’s property: losing that connection.
Would the man ever be able to recover if his pile of dirt suddenly stopped replenishing itself as it always had and simply slipped into nothingness? He may never be whole again.
This is a daunting process – sequestering ourselves in others and the things around us. Why would a man attempt to care about the pile of dirt in the back left corner of his property if that very act of caring threatened to hurt the man one day? As simple as it may seem, if the man ceased all attempts at forging new connections, he simply would not be. How dreadfully starchy. The man goes about getting emotionally attached to the pile of dirt in the back left corner of his property anyway.