As I got up this morning day 10 of living by myself, I was reminded what lonliness feels like. I have a new and deeper appreciation for my single friends, for those who have lost loved ones or were once married and now find themselves single. I especially have thought about our troops and their families. The long periods of time away from each other must be very difficult. This morning on my run I was thinking about personality profiles? In the Myers-Briggs Profile the first letter is an E or an I, representing Extrovert or Introvert. Basically these terms are not so much whether you are outgoing or quiet but rather how you are energized. So, yesterday my laptop computer’s charger died. I was watching the little battery indicator slowly draining throughout the day, and today that picture came back to me. If you are an introvert your battery gets fueled by being alone. You get a full charge and you can enjoy being with a group of people for a while, but while you’re there your battery is slowly loosing its charge. I’m an extrovert, which means it is just the opposite. If my battery is low, being in a high energy, room full of people puts the juice back to me. It charges my battery even more if there is some people who know and love me and connect at a deeper level than surface talk. The charge fills more and more the longer I’m in the crowd. When I’m all alone for very long I can feel the charge slowly depleting. So, I’ve felt something I’ve carried most my life, a sense of deep lonliness in times like this. For me, that feeling growing stronger is like the warning light coming on my computer, “Plug it in or its shutting down.” So, tomorrow afternoon I’ll be in a room full of family and feel the energy coming back to chase the lonliness away for now! Thanks to all my friends who helped keep my charge from totally depleting while the misiz has been away.