Painfully shy. It is a feeling that permeates past the crossroads and down to the soul. Instantaneous. Solomon says.. (it is always handy to invoke a sage when your own fear-of-acceptance begins to dominate...shyness ...fear of Mudcat acceptance...but i suppose my own shyness is not all that great since I dare to write these words, ooh, now I'm feeling bold)...as Solomon says, what I think he has to say, is that much of human suffering is caused by the feeling of separateness; that (God, do I think that I can say, in a separate line, what Solomon tried to say to the world in verse after verse? Well,... ya, what the heck)...that a person can realise that he/she is a part of the whole as opposed to being separate from the whole. It is buddhism. Solomon was a danged buddhist. Shyness, according to Solomon and Jung (well, everyone knew that at some point modern psychology would be thrown into this thread)...shyness is a kind of hyper-sensitivity of the separate ego. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that hyper-sensitivity is very good, and that separate is not. Next time one is at a cocktail party, one can look around and one can say to one's self: "I feel isolated and alienated from this group of others." Or one can say: "I am a part of this group of strange people, and what is more, I am a hyper-sensitive part of this group and therefore a very essential part of this group." Eric