Finally, after yearly a year had passed, I received an email asking for forgiveness for not seeking me out for coffee sooner. It was an honest plea, but I replied to him:
"You ask for forgiveness, but I tell you that I will not give it. Why? Because you have done absolutely nothing wrong by me. In all relationships we tacitly perform a cost/benefit analysis. It is all about the quotient. Where the benefits outweigh the costs, we tend to naturally end up in and around those folks. It is uncanny how easily this just seems to happen. Where the costs outweigh the benefits, we put up barriers. In my years I have found that those barriers are most often erected not out of malice or dislike. In fact, they are not even usually erected consciously or with intention. Yet the fact that they stand tells us all that we need to know if we take a moment to look at the landscape that we have put up and the choices that we have made."
I guess my sense is that if you just skip from the tip of one wave crest to the tip of the next wave crest, you never appreciate nor understand the true depths of the ocean. Maybe my reply might seem cruel to you, but to me it was the only possible one that I could give.
