by Jerry Thomas

Created on: April 24, 2008   Last Updated: April 22, 2010

Meeting New People

I think I would rather pet a huge snake in a pet store than to go and meet new people. Meeting the opposite sex is down right dangerous. Now we have new tools; MySpace, Facebook, Craig's List, and many other avenues to lessen the fear. We can always delete, log off, kill the power to the computer to make our escape! Before such tools and before movies and books that depicted bizarre situations where the victims are lured, tortured and killed we were normal. In my youth I looked forward to meeting new people. It was an adventure and it was exciting.

As we age, we count our hours, fear that we might waste these precious moments in fruitless listening to peoples ideas, goals, and dreams. Relationships are quick to make, but are timelessly long in ending. We don't have the skill to recognize the iceberg drifting ever so close to our ocean liner. Seems we can't avoid these obstacles to our happiness and we are doomed to failure before we start!

We don't want to be impolite or hurt each other's feelings so we silently ease out the door to make our escape. All this trouble makes us wary, cold and distant. We add layers just as we would on a cold windy night, to shield ourselves from over-commitment. You would think with the advent of Spring and the reminders of nature's frenzy to mate, we would be eager to join the fray.

We still fear opening up and being vulnerable, so we rush to our offices and then rush to our abodes and lock the door. Hope still exists in a small part of us, because alone in our homes, we turn on our computers and look for possibilities. Tom at MySpace was quite clever, we all have been on this site, as we browse in the safety of the unanimity of our web page. Each day we lose the skill of face to face communication. The safety of our castles can soon become our prison!

September 11, 2001 has become a catch all for not trusting others and ourselves. As a nation, a people and a gender we have come to fear others. Rejection has been replaced by caution. How can we let our guard down and suffer such pain? As each day goes by, our doors become harder to open! Time and time again, it's getting harder and harder to find the key to the lock!

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