The cold world

"The World", for brethren, which is just the normal everyday world for everyone else, is a dark and scary place. It's held up as a warning of what the alternative to the brethren's life is. It's cold, and lonely, peopled with strangers who will never care about you, and to be cast out into it is to be deprived of all human warmth as well as to know that everybody you ever cared about feels you unfit for companionship. It isn't so, of course. People outside the brethren are pretty much like people inside the brethren, much as that may shock a few on each side. They aren't inherently more heartless, and come in enough varieties that pretty much everybody should be able to find some likeable ones. Having said that, though, I have to confess that after a few years of experience it does quite often feel effectively the same as the brethren claim. It can't really be otherwise. I left behind what was basically a huge family, where I was firmly plugged into a communal life where everybody was affected by everybody else's actions, and there is nothing to replace that. And yes, I mostly found it stifling at the time and couldn't face going back to it, but that doesn't mean its opposite is always ideal. The wind on a mountain top may be bracing and exhilarating, or it may be bitter, depending on one's condition and vulnerability. I guess there may well be people around, including ex-brethren, who enjoy a constant round of friendship and have daily social interaction. I don't. I don't much like group socialising, and if you don't like groups it's very hard to stumble across other people who feel the same way. I haven't cracked that conundrum yet. The people I met when I first left were either secondhand friends, who were taken back by their original owners when I parted ways with them, or were more interested in my ex-brethren condition, which has become normal. None have stayed friends as I would think of it. There isn't anybody who can talk or meet up at any time for no reason. That probably says more about me than about them, to be honest. I conclude most people's lives congeal over time. They set, not quite hard, but they set, and the friends and family in their lives at some point between youth and middle age become the ones they take through life with them. Everybody I meet has that kind of life, and since I cut mine off I'm without it. For them, I'm an extra, and they will think about me sometimes if the circumstances are right, but that's all. That doesn't mean the world is cold and pitiless, it just means that I've had a disconnection in my life which other people haven't. But at times the difference can be hard to spot.