Where did I put my Zen rock?

[hobgoblinx]

I used to sit on it all the time. Perched atop the rock I could quietly observe the world around me with a cool detachment and be generally emotionally indifferent to the happenings around me, instead simply observing and filing and analyzing with logical deduction. Very recently in my life, starting about five months ago, all of this seemed to change. The wall of zen I had built around my life came crashing down and all of a sudden I wasn't just seeing the world around me but I was feeling it, too. And all rather intensely. And where once I could coldly look at a friend's troubles before and break them down to them and offer advice in a way that made reasonable sense, now I find my heart aching with their pain, my stomach knotted with their guilt, my head pounding with their headaches.

I wonder at the change on nights like this when I sit alone, a pass time not at all uncommon to me in the past, and find myself strangely yearning for that human contact, that human experience beyond myself. I am not used to wanting the company of others. I am not sure what precipitated this change, why all of a sudden my empathy went from off to off the scale, but I don't think it is something that is going away any time soon.

I suppose my choices are either to try and find the rock again, or perhaps just make better plans to hang out with people on the weekends, because being alone with myself lately is like screaming into an amplified microphone held in front of the speaker output and riding out the cascading emotional feedback.