Thank you kind sir. I didn't know any of what I wrote in these prayer posts was appreciated. Every night I spend some time meditating (just relaxing completely and dumping all conscious thoughts so that I can receive thoughts) and I write them down. I just looked through my writings to find something that would be a good addition to this conversation, and I found the following, which I hope is helpful in some way (either to you or someone else): When we were young, we had plenty of opportunities to be around other kids doing the same things we liked to do, and we learned how to become friends. That is the real life skill, how to see the good in other people and form a connection based on it. Nobody tells us how many people fall out of our lives as we go through them. We need to accept that and always be looking for the good in others. What we are doing right now is thinking of how painful it is when someone leaves our lives (for any reason) and doing a cost analysis to come up with the false, but accepted, idea that it is not worth making new friends because we know they they will leave our lives somehow one day and it will hurt. We need to all focus more on the feeling and less on the people, so that we don't have time to hold onto the bad feelings of not seeing someone anymore, but finding the good in more people and filling ourselves with that.