The blind-stampede trampling of your feelings by any kind of carelessness or indifference is a mistreatment on a level where pain tortures you without quite killing you. Wounded feelings become emotional back-stabbers that, like traitors, turn your own trustfulness into a curse when these surrendered ones, inside your own heart, defect to the other side and join forces with hostile thoughts. All you then long for is to be allowed, just for one round, to sit it out. Simply to lick your wounds, or, until the storm passes, to reposition yourself and work out a new survival strategy. To be able to disappear, just somewhere, into an emotional vacuum.

But the rules of the game do not allow it. You can hide, lie low, or turn your back on circumstances, but you may not sit out. The game needs all its players. The grabbers and the givers. The sluggish and the willing. The cheerful and the curdled. The bearers of grudges and the full-of-love ones. Those who accuse and those who acquit. But the greatest impact on our lives comes from the spoilt ones and from those who spoil. The spoilt ones are reasonably harmless as long as their hungry egos can sit down at a laid-out table. But those who spoil do not rest until they have spoiled your day (in many ways) or until they have tried to change the rules of the game.

To develop a fine sense for what it is they are hiding behind, and for when they will strike, is a lifelong task and a lifelong art. The red warning mark of these robbers of any form of individuality and trustfulness is as well hidden as that of a button-[spider?]. The deadly venom of their moods, which does not kill but only paralyses and makes you wish you could disqualify [withdraw?] yourself from the game, is mostly tucked away inside professional hospitality and outward civility. Bound only to the one great craving of their hearts, which pumps for them to impose their will or their mood on others, both your own happiness and the rules of the game lie subject to their sincere [but isn't that a positive word; what about utter?] insensitivity.

To try to make any sense of an encounter with them is impossible. These grabbers rob you there where it is not possible to put up bars. Brokers offer no insurance either against an emotional collision with them.

Somewhere a dove is cooing — innocent, untimely, but in time and sincere. The rules of the game stay the same, and the referee has blown his whistle for a restart.