Solitude and Hope: Y'all Come Visit!

Tragedy in life (including the lesser tragedies of everyday life, such as the insults, accidents, and obstacles that arouse our emotional melodramas and annoying irritations) is experienced as a personal violation that unmasks our mostly unformulated assumptions about how we think our world should be, and the degree to which we assume that it actually is as we think it should be. Unexamined commitment to those assumptions inevitably leads us to embrace an illusory world that avoids the accepting awareness of major elements of our world as it really is, such as the inevitable facts of death and limited mortality already essentially contained in it.