Seneca, Moral Letters 3.5

There is a class of men who communicate, to anyone whom they meet, matters which should be revealed to friends alone, and unload upon the chance listener whatever irks them. 
 
Others, again, fear to confide in their closest intimates; and if it were possible, they would not trust even themselves, burying their secrets deep in their hearts. 
 
But we should do neither. It is equally faulty to trust everyone and to trust no one. Yet the former fault is, I should say, the more ingenuous, the latter the more safe.
 
I was never a gregarious person, and I couldn’t help but always feel deeply anxious around other people, so I never had the chance to be that fellow who shared too much with everyone else. 
 
I did, however, share far too much with a very select few people, imagining that they were the special soulmates I craved. The error was just as tragic, because the method of selection was completely off. 
 
Having found myself burned, I apparently thought it better that I should freeze, and thus began many years of deliberate isolation. It was just as foolish, though it seemed to make sense at the time, as I was working only from how I felt, not from what I was willing to understand. 
 
Even when I am, at the moment, oblivious to all the deeper workings inside me, I can still recognize that something is amiss by the simple fact that I am swinging from one extreme to another. There will be far too much of something one day, and then suddenly far too little of something the next. How exhausting and how fruitless. 
 
There are all sorts of pithy sayings to help us through life, along the lines of loving ourselves more, or not giving away too much, and yet none of them will make any sense without an awareness of the mean between excess and deficiency. 
 
That balance is not a matter of social convention, or the whim of the moment, or the coldness of abstract doctrine. That Goldilocks zone is found through the measure of Nature herself, which is discovered through wisdom. 
 
“I don’t feel like I love you anymore!” is in and of itself a meaningless phrase, since it fails to see that love is a choice, an act of the will informed by awareness, and not merely a sentiment. 
 
So it is also with any sort of trust. To trust a “friend” on a gut instinct, or on the fancy of a passion, was always what got me into trouble. I do not wish to suggest that it is wrong to feel intensely, since my own disposition is subject to deep emotion. I do, however, wish to suggest that feeling without first thinking will always be random and rudderless. 
 
When in doubt, I now try to follow Seneca’s advice. Is it better to be too open or too closed? Neither one is better, because what is best is found between them. 

Written in 2/2012