Mara's Musings

I have a few people in my life who will look at me and ask because they see by my demeanour that I am obviously not.   These people are the true friends, the ones who don't pressurise you into talking about it if you don't want to, or get you to expose more of yourself than you are willing and will listen without judgement and also without looking bored or dragging the conversation back to themselves.  These people are rare gems indeed.

Mostly, and we all do it, we ask people  "are you OK?" and they say "Yes" or "I'm fine" and we are happy.  Off we go in our own little world where we have proved to ourselves and the other person just how caring we are because we took time out to enquire as to the wellbeing of our fellow human.

If you say NO this causes immediate confusion.  You broke the social rule.  You are not supposed to be honest because that's not playing the little game.  Now you have put that person in a awkward position where they basically have to demonstrate to you that they give enough of a toss to listen to what you have to say.  Or even worse, if you tell them you are not OK but don't want to discuss it with them.  What to do?  Prise it out of you or just be more honest, breathe a sigh of relief and skip off. 

Maybe I am just feeling cynical today, or maybe its time I learnt from the repeated experience of the fact that no matter how much time you have for other people, they will rarely return the favour!