Things I know: most of us…

• …feel more alone than we are
• …are hubs/locuses of various communities of people who depend on us, usually to degrees where they don’t let us know how critical we are to them
• …are lacking explicit validation and calibration
• …have been struggling more than we let on publicly [and to a large extent with various friend/family groups], with the decade, the pandemic, the fascism, the climate breakdown, idiotically hot summers and fires that will only get worse, the wars and invasions and genocides, the uncertainty of the long-range future, let alone the rest of this decade—in which most of us are taking nothing for granted.
• …don’t know that most of the people in our lives/circles would step up to do a bit, once or sporadically or regularly, or a lot more when we’re thin and lacking capacity, even though we’re reluctant to ask; asking builds richer, thicker networks, brain cells, axon-dendite connections

the stellar sea lions know these things