Sooo, I go rambling about people who go to work sick and how they should rather just stay home and guess what, I get sick over the long weekend. And then I went into work today. I went home shortly afterwards and ended up sleeping the afternoon away just to try annilate the terrorists that have taken up residence in various parts of my immune system.
Ok, I'm digressing from my original point just slightly. Why is it that we are all so good at dishing out advice but so bad at taking the very same advice from ourselves? We can objectively look at someone else's situation and give them 101 things to do and to not do and yet if we should find ourselves in a similar or even the identical situation, we don't even think about giving ourselves advice, never mind taking it.
Case in point was today, I found out that someone I know is going through a divorce. Now the person that he is, he's been the shoulder for other people to lean on in the same situation, but now that he's there, he doesn't give himself his own advice and when I said to him something that he already knew, it was like a light came on - an 'oh yeah' moment. He knew the advice, he just couldnt give it to himself.
Maybe this is like a built in failsafe that we're all given. Maybe this is the way we're designed, to depend on other people. Humans to all intents and purposes are social creatures and maybe this is a way to re-establish contact when we're disconnecting from something. We need contact with other people, whether it be in person or even nowadays via the internet or sms. I think that's what the whole appeal of chat programs, chat rooms and things like mxit are: it's a way to connect to many different people on different levels. It lets you be the different people you are inside all in the same place.
I guess it's also a way of hedging our bets so to say. The more people we have connections with, the less likely it's going to hurt should any of those connection disconnect. Obviously the strength of the connection counts, but if you have 100 other people to fall back on who all sympathise and support you, you feel a lot better than if you had no one.
The only drawback then is that you only have so much time and effort to put into each of those connections and the more you have, the thinner you end up spreading yourself until each person only gets a megre amount of you and most likely will only return the same amount of attention to you.
So it's that balance that counts, have enough to have support but not too much that you're not just connecting on a superficial level. If anyone knows how to get that right, let me know, you could make a fortune :)
0 comments:
Post a Comment