^^
42.
If we want to describe our society in terms of age, we may come up with four age groups—childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age. We take it for granted that people of different ages behave differently. For example, we feel that a man in his thirties should act his age and not behave like an adolescent or an old man. Equally, we expect that, as they go through life, people of the same age will in some ways understand each other better than people of different ages. All this is part of expected ways of behaving in our social life, but it is not something that we can apply in formal institutions governed by hard-and-fast rules.
43.
I knocked at the door and was told to enter. I found myself in a large room, where the curtains were closed to allow no daylight in, and the candles were lit. In the center of the room, sitting at a table, was the strangest lady I had ever seen. She was wearing a wedding dress made of rich material. She had a bride’s flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. She only had one white shoe on. Then I realized that over the years the flowers in her hair had died, and the bride inside the dress had grown old. Everything in the room was ancient. The only brightness in the room was in her dark old eyes that stared at me.
44.
One of the toughest parts of isolation is a lack of an expressive exit. With anger, you can get mad at someone and yell. With sadness, you can cry. But isolation feels like being in a room with no way out.
And the longer you get stuck there, the harder it becomes to share the pain and sorrow. In isolation, hope disappears, despair rules, and you can no longer see a life beyond the invisible walls that imprison you.
Some people find it helpful to work gently at driving themselves back into the world. In one case, a woman reported that after four miserable forced lunches with friends, she suddenly enjoyed the fifth one as she found herself laughing at a joke.
For people who cannot push themselves, however, support groups are a good cure for isolation. They offer the opportunity for connection in a safe and controlled way.
