Here’s something to contemplate: People as Pendulums.
They’re peculiar things, pendulums. They can’t change mid-swing. When you let one fly, it goes pretty much as far in the opposite direction as it started in the first. Equal and opposite extremes, one might say. It can’t, for instance, swing forty degrees left of center but only twenty degrees to the right.
Have you ever noticed a similar thing about people? It seems to me the ones who are able to experience the highest levels of joy are also the ones who experience the deepest levels of sorrow. I think it’s because both of those require a deep ability to feel. Because they can feel so deeply, they equally feel the good and the bad.
Knowing that, remember to be careful what you ask people to stop doing. By trying to temper a negative quality you don’t enjoy, you might be limiting their “pendulum’s” ability to experience the other side of that coin–you just might be cutting off the positives in their personality that you do enjoy. It’s like asking an Italian not to talk with their hands. By tying their hands you may well be tying their tongues! By asking one to be “less emotional,” you may well be asking them to be less exuberant, less positive or less brilliant. Their emotions are their power, the force that allows them to swing that high in the positive direction, too.
People, and pendulums–they’re peculiar things, aren’t they?
