Of Pens and Swords

The break. Intermission.

I was driving home the other day, and was thinking of problems of dependencies of services here on my network. I won’t bore you with the details, but it lead me to think about dependencies in people, how some place their dependencies on others instead of themselves. Take Happiness for instance. In order for me to be happy, I have to make myself happy. I can define things that make me happy, and some of those fall on the actions of others. Overall, however, it’s up to me to accept those actions as a ’service’ that makes me happy.

I then thought about, how could I explain this in layman’s terms to someone else, to drive the concept home. How could I describe dependencies to say, a child of 6. A basketball came into mind. Here’s how:

1. Take two basketballs (or any other large balls for that matter, not mine) and tether them with a yarn, or a thread, and put a loop around it to fit your hand through. Make the tether about 6 feet long or so. The ball should be small enough to hold, but large enough to be sort of unmanageable.
2. Now, take the loop, and put your hand through one, the other persons through the other. You are now tethered to that ball.
3. Explain that the ball represents “Happiness”, or “Feelings”, “Emotions”, so forth. You are now holding on to your Happiness, and it’s tethered to you.
4. The objective is to not let the ball fall, or let your “happiness” fall. If it does, it will break. Now play, bounce around, run in circles, whatever. This running around represents living life, going about your business, so forth. More than likely, you can hold onto your Happiness with no problem. It may require using both hands at some point, but nevertheless, it’s manageable.
5. Now, I pass my ball off to the other person. It’s still tethered to me. I explain that now, you (the other person) are holding my happiness. Treat it like your own, hold it up high, and don’t let it fall. (this represents me passing off the responsibility of maintaining my happiness)
6. Repeat step 4. The more you play, the more my tether is going to become tight. So tight, that now my happiness is pulled from your (the other persons) arms. What!?, You let my happiness fall!?!
7. Pick up my happiness, explain to the other person that you can’t let my happiness fall, or it will break. The other person is going to probably note that it’s becoming unmanageable to hold both their happiness and mine, and they can’t play as much nor enjoy life as much because now the workload has become great. I am going to ignore this, because, well, all I care about is my happiness, not theirs. I explain that it’s more important to hold onto my happiness and keep it from breaking than it is theirs, because, afterall, it is mine.
8. Repeat step 4 again. Now that I’ve thoroughly explained how important it is that my happiness is to take precedence, I’m sure that the other person is going to take great care in not letting my happiness fall again. If they do, I may cry.
9. While playing, the other person held onto my happiness, and tight, because I was playing hard. They held onto it so tight that while trying to put down their happiness for a while, making sure it didn’t break or get caught up in the other person’s happiness (which would make both balls fall), the tether broke. They sure held onto my happiness tight, and didn’t let it drop, but in the process, ripped my happiness from me. Now, I don’t have any happiness, it’s been ripped from me. The other person, in the process, had to also drop their happiness in order to have both hands to hold onto mine.

I think this could be applied to almost any emotional need of a person, to explain how being solely dependent on someone else to provide for your emotional wellbeing is detrimental to both parties. I think it would be a great explanation of what others do sometimes expect of you, and why it’s important to never take on the responsibilities of holding both your emotions and theirs. If they drop their emotions because they’re mad, well, it wasn’t you that they can blame in the end for hurting their feelings, but their own. It’s also a good explanation, I feel, to show why it’s important not to rely on others for what in the end is a dependency that only you can hold.