Finding Strength of Will

Got an email from a friend this week and I wasn’t sure how to reply. You’d think it would be easy. Something simple would suffice, like: “I wish I were there to go with you. Sounds like a lot of fun.” But for some reason I found it difficult to say even that. Here’s why. We’ve been friends for a long time now. Since our first teenage years. We were friends by nature of a mutual friend first, but over time our own friendship grew. He was quiet and reserved, introverted. He like to have things just so. His room was always in order and he paid attention to the details but without getting bogged down by them. He seemed to know what he liked and what he didn’t like without much hesitation. All quite different from me. My room would go through fitful bouts of cleanliness and disarray. My likes and dislikes related much more directly to my mood rather than to any empirical method of elimination of less appealing options. Even my favorite color varied from day to day. He and

See "On Affection, Part 1". It's been about a year since I wrote this. It's been a bit. Took a break for a few minutes. Thoughts are coming again now. In reflection, what I have written here so far was not at all what I was expecting.  I was expecting to discourse on the complexity of attraction and the need for affection, and instead I found my answers in a surprising way.  I have been pondering about the ways in which people of the world seek for sexual fulfillment and gratification.  The ways are many and diverse, each bringing pleasure in its way, but very few resulting in real satisfaction.  And as our physical mind seeks pleasure, indeed it is programmed to do so, it is simple and easy to believe that in some way it is possible to be satisfied solely from pleasure. But most of these methods are almost entirely selfish and one-sided.  It is impossible to ever feel completely gratified and fulfilled when our primary motivation is to fulfill our own n