Not saying I won’t change it again, but for the moment it’s “We Wear the Mask.”

It’s a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar and was the first poem that I ever read that felt like someone was reading my mind.  And for years, it was my touchstone. It says, in part,

“Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.”

With this corner of the interweb, I’m saying in a (slightly) more public format things my friends have heard me vent about for years.   In public, I often wear my social mask, but as I get older, that mask is slipping more and more.  Perhaps not such a bad thing.  Mr Dunbar was writing in a different time than that which I live, thanks be to God, so perhaps a modification of personal habits is in order.