Storm(s)

Sometimes, certain events and relationships in life can really catch you off guard, and threaten to dismantle the entire set of beliefs and values that you once depended on for survival. Such events and relationships affect us emotionally, and attack us where we are most vulnerable: no human made of flesh and blood who is male or female, intelligent or brute, wealthy or poor, idealist or pragmatic, is impenetrable at his or her heart. The heart represents the set of things that we value or care about the most. We do not need to be conscious of what we value to actually care about things: deprive a man of something that you suspect he loves and offer him no prospect of getting it back, and if he does indeed value it, you will subsequently see that you have also deprived him of his vitality, his appetite, his sleep, his control over his facial expressions, and his meaning to live. By attacking his heart, you plunge the man into a state of emotional excess, and if that doesn't generate extreme sadness, then you may yield extreme hatred, or anger. If you are tempted to think that such extreme emotions only exist on an abstract, conceptual level, reconsider; emotions generate real physiological effects, and in the case of extreme emotions, the physiological effects produced by those emotions can be absolutely crippling.

And when these events and relationships hit us, or when we know that such things are about to turn our lives upside-down, there are few things that one can do. Like knowing that a violent storm is coming straight at you and you have no place to shelter yourself, the only thing to do is to brave the storm; or face the music, so to speak. Under these circumstances, there are only two roads that one can take: stand strong in the face of rain and wind - at least a last attempt, struggle at survival -  or perish quietly and insignificantly.