Today, on a beautiful evening boat cruise on a lake, under a flawless night sky, I was aware of the presence of someone I’ve been successfully avoiding for years. There are some people (fortunately only a few) who come into your life and proceed to sow a path of utter destruction, dismantling your dearest friendships, your professional relationships, the trust between you and others, wreaking untold havok in that place deep within yourself that anchors you, that tells you you are safe.<\/p>\n
To encounter such a person some years later, in an unexpected place, is a shock. I found myself carefully monitoring the situation, some part of me going into emergency survival mode. I did not wish any sort of confrontation, or even encounter. My goal was to get through the evening as though this Grendel were not there.<\/p>\n
To a large degree I succeeded. The presence of a few good friends helped considerably. At the end of the evening the boat docked and I maneuvered silently past my nemesis, realizing that I had survived, that the circumstances that had allowed this person to cause such horror in my life no longer pertained, that I was relatively safe.<\/p>\n
Of course we are never completely safe. We each, from time to time, meet our nemesis, someone capable of tearing down the things we most care about. But we move on, watchful, wary, until one day we encounter them again, perhaps under a night sky on a lake, and we observe, with a kind of watchful relief, that their dark power seems at last to be gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today, on a beautiful evening boat cruise on a lake, under a flawless night sky, I was aware of the presence of someone I’ve been successfully avoiding for years. There are some people (fortunately only a few) who come into your life and proceed to sow a path of utter destruction, dismantling your dearest friendships, … Continue reading “On a lake”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1692,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions\/1692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}