As if With Stiff Bristles…

“How often do we see men and women set themselves about as if with stiff bristles,” said Samuel Smiles, “so that one dare scarcely approach them without fear of being pricked! For want of a little…command over one’s temper or resentment,” he continued, “…enjoyment is turned into bitterness, and life becomes like a journey barefooted among thorns and briers and prickles.” These sentences suggest the tensions, the moods and misunderstandings, the hurt feelings, the irritating trivialities, and sometimes serious offenses, that cause people who live within the same walls to surround themselves with something of a shell, almost as if there were physical separators. Husbands and wives sometimes become so separated, in feelings if not in physical fact, because of little or even large things that could be corrected — people who could recover what they have lost, or feel they have lost, who still could find the respect, the confidence, the communication that once brought them together. Despite difficulties, irritations, and sometimes perhaps things more deep-seated, still with patience and kindness often there can come again a closeness of confidence and companionship and a halt to letting things drift in the wrong direction. Often what is needed is not so much a change of place and people as a change within ourselves inside. If there has been drifting in a wrong direction, or if differences have been allowed to pull people apart, until there is change inside there is no assurance that there can be a better life, and when there is change within, there is no assurance that the differences cannot be reconciled, with an opening up again of understanding. Let none of us be strangers within the walls in which we live our lives. Let there not be “stiff bristles, so that one dare scarcely approach… another person without fear of being pricked.”