Dear Peter:

Thank you for your contemplative and spiritually layered message.

You wrote: “I know how quickly the work we have done to move past our hurts can be undone by outer events we have no control over…”- The good news is that I am not back in that same old, familiar, unwanted territory. Not anymore—not for a long time. Gone is the deep depression, the complete desperation, the aching powerlessness. There’s been learning and growth I’ve committed to for years. It’s built, day by day, into something steady—something that bears fruit I can rely on.

I’m far from being the same person I was in the first half of my life. I am still the same little girl in some ways, yes—but also a very different woman now.

When you wrote: “Is this the cry of current world affairs? Are we letting go of love…”— that rang true. My heartbreak isn’t only personal. It feels collective. My grief echoes the grief of the world: the conflict, the division, the cruelty, the disconnection. That kind of love that lets us care with honesty and gentleness—it feels like it’s been slipping away everywhere, not just in my story.

You also asked: “I wonder if what you’re really letting go of is the version of love that hurt you…”- And yes—exactly. I’m not giving up on love itself. I’m releasing a version of it that hurt: the kind that demanded silence, disappearance, and the erasure of self. A version tangled in fear, obligation, and pain. That’s not “love” I want to carry anymore. It’s too heavy. Too shaped like harm.

And “Love can be fierce. Love can walk away. Love can protect.”—yes. That line opened something in me. Setting boundaries, walking away, even shielding myself from someone who once defined love for me… that is love too. I can see that now, and I won’t unsee it.

With gratitude for walking beside me in this reckoning, Anita

Back to the title of this thread: “Life Worth Living- what is it like?”

(whatever comes to mind this late Monday night (still full light outside and birds singing, chirping)-

A life worth living is one that FEELS like it’s worthy of living.

This is the simplest answer I can think of.

It’s the FEELING. Life is about Feeling Alive, connected, involved; connected within and without. No loner alone and lonely within or without.

Anita

I feel Lonely tonight. I say “night” although there’s no darkness outside the windows that surround me. But there’s some darkness in my heart.

Birds singing, I love hearing them!

I wish I was never alone when I don’t want to be alone. And I don’t want to be alone on this bright- light- night.

There’s so much Lonely in so many, many people’s hearts, lonely cold-hot, burning hearts. Invisible, inaudible fires.

All alone burning.

If you are reading this, please know- I am not asking for either empathy, nor sympathy.

I am not asking for anything from you.

What I am doing is exploring the-emptiness-within.

If I journal this privately.. it wouldn’t do it for me. But in a public forum such as this- there is a CHANCE, however small, that someone out there might understand me, really. Or that someone out there is just like me. Someone that was always there with me, but I didn’t know.

I am looking for me.. in someone else.

The exploration I am talking about, is about not knowing what I will be typing out next. What else is coming out from the depth of me..?

What’s in the depths of all of us?

The Desire to Connect, I says!

It is only if you experienced the longevity and intensity of my social isolation and loneliness, that you’d understand.

Desire to Connect- acronym: D2C, ha-ha (I love acronyms).

People are too occupied with their own stuff to be available for my stuff.

I may be too occupied with my own stuff.

So, what else is coming out from the depth of me..?

– The sincere desire to make a difference for me, for you!

If you are reading. Are You? If you are reading this, tell me.. what do you think? What do you feel? Who are you.. What, or who would you like to be, or become before you die..?

Before I die, I would like to.. to.. reach you, just this one person who may be reading this, wanting to be reached, just Like I so desperately wanted for way too long.

9:15 pm here (light, no sign of darkness) and most likely, no one will be responding to this.

Yet, still, I reached out.

And I respect this about me, that I reached out.

Anita

Dear Peter:

Thank you so much for your response.

You didn’t stand outside my experience, trying to fix it or name it. You stepped into it with me—with your hands open, your metaphors ready, and your breath beside my silence. Your words didn’t feel like advice; they felt like companionship.

Reading what you wrote stirred something in me. I realized: this is how I’ve often responded to others in these forums—standing just outside their pain, shining light into it, offering ideas, guidance, even hope—but too often from the outside. Trying to fix. Trying to label. A bit arrogant, isn’t it?

What people need most isn’t advice, but presence—true, steady, sincere presence.

When you wrote about darkness not as the absence of light but as its beginning… and about stillness being the breath before the song—that landed. It helped me see more clearly that the quiet emptiness I’ve felt isn’t something to fear. Maybe something lives in it. Maybe something is waiting.

You didn’t try to cheer me up. You joined me. And that’s rare. And beautiful. And I’m grateful.

If there’s more you feel moved to share—your thoughts, your ache, your stillness—I’d receive it with care. I sense there’s still more conversation waiting between the lines.

Warmly, Anita

Hi Peter:

Not to rush to interpret or act, control or explain. To allow meaning to ripen over time.

Some truths grow stronger in stillness— in the quiet. The value of rest, not the rush to resolve.

Like you’ve said many times, a tree is not the word tree. A map is not the territory.

So—loneliness is… (I feel myself lifting a pen to sketch a map.) Maybe I just sit with the ache and let it be the territory.

Loneliness, distress, pain— the invitation is not to escape through words, analyses, or urgency. It is simply: rest in the territory. Don’t rush to map it out..

Anita

It’s okay, Peter, if you are giving up on me. It’s okay. It’s just that resting-into-the territory has to include .. in my case, decades-long of no-living, of languishing in a never-ending emotional- spiritual death while (physically) young and while getting older, not even noticing because I never got to be/ feel young. So…

It’s like being born and then violently thrown into old age with the part of BEING YOUNG missing.

Thank you, Peter. If this is uncomfortable for you, please feel comfortable to not respond. I almost hope you won’t. Because I think I may be a burden to you.

Anita