Friendship Maintenance and Care: Mia Culpa

Karen,

You wrote rightly admonishing me on my lack of attention.

We are supposed to be friends, you said.

We are friends but where have I been in relation to you?

I have no excuse. I hopefully have not lost your care. You would not have felt able to write to me thus if you did not feel able to. That smacks of friendship to me means that you do care whither I find time for you. I recently wrote here that we, as human beings, fear rejection above all else. I argued that the abuse of rejection, is to most of us, far more of a fear than the possibility or even the actuality of physical abuse. In war the military exploit this. Soldiers fear far more not being with and for their comrades than they fear death.

I am on record at my website that I believe firmly in "life work balance". I state that roughly w0rk should get 25% of your life, sleep/rest 25%%, self 25% and ones relationships with others 25%. Recently I have been working on 80% self and work and only 2% for relationships and *% for sleep. Most of my life I have acted thus. This lost me my marriage

For the last two months since I returned to Canberra. I have not touched based with you, Marcelo, Stephen the Jumptown Lindy Hop crew, and Annette Burki and Phone.

Now there is a joy in this wonderful country - a Brazilian, a very British person of Chinese origin, a crowd from every country you can imagine, a Swiss and a Laotian. What a wonderful lucky country Australia is indeed. Nowhere else in the world could you meet and strike up acquaitance with such a rich variety of backgrounds. I also have a British, Australian Polish friend, Jim Pollard ( Polkowski) and his friend and partner Isobel who is Portuguese.

I live and work for a coming together of the human family but a coming together that positively supports, nay indulges, in our wonderful diversity in our oneness.

For fun you sent me the following in English????????????????????

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55% fo plepoe can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

I made it. I could read it quite fluently. I am not sure what that proves about me particularly but it does show how wonderfully adaptabe the human mind is.

I am told that in fully declined langauges, such as Russian, where the order of words is irrelevant careless or ill educated people can speak without declining yet are understood. Chinese is interesting. It deliberately maintains a written language that is disconnected from the language as spoken. It is an ideographic written language. There is no reason why you cannot not write English or any other langauge in Chinese characters. Arabic is interesting too because as the Koran is written in Arabic all Muslims learn the written scholarly Arabic of 1500 year ago. This is only distantly related in style to the Arabic spoken today in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, etc.

In deed our capacity to deal with such conundrums makes perceived barriers to human communication of doubtful validity especially when so so much of life, eating, drinking, feeling and making love can be carried out in a well co-ordinated way wihtout words at all and dancing, which I love, says everything in movement, WOW! Are we not wonderful we humans.

Thank you Karen for reminding me of this. I am sometimes an inhuman human being. I will see you for you very soon.

Your dear and grateful friend

Brian