The metaphor…
Imagine a balloon we fill with water. We don’t want an empty balloon, but we only have one so we don’t want it to pop.
The more water we pour the bigger the balloon becomes, stretching the rubber thinner and thinner.
We have two possible outcomes for this:
- We keep filling the balloon until it pops eventually.
- We turn off the tap.
Obviously option number one seem like a gamble. Option two will at least leave us with plenty of choices.
- We can squeeze to get the water out until the balloon can fit in our hand.
- We can keep it as it is, if we like it
- If we feel we squeezed too much water out we can still repeat the process carefully.
… applied to our lives
Our lives are the balloon and the water is whatever we choose to put in them. Possessions, relationships, career, pleasures…
I just think that we need to remember from time to time that we and we alone have a hand on the tap. Therefore we and we alone can make the decision of how much water we let in. We and we alone are responsible if the balloon pops because we kept the water running and didn’t watch for the rubber getting streched too thin.
If, however, someone were to poke our balloon with a needle that will not be of our responsibility because it is not under our control. What is under our control is how thin and tense we choose to maintain the rubber.
Wouldn’t a balloon reasonably filled be more resilient to needles or to external pressure? One would need to squeeze much harder to spill the water, and would need a sharper needle to tear the rubber
“So?”
So less is more, as I wrote a couple days ago. What I know for sure is that experimenting minimalism and stoicism on myself made me way happier. I know that I feel less vulnerable, more calm, less anxious, and better prepared to face the ups and downs of life since I started trying to keep my balloon a reasonable size
I think there is a big difference between having our lives filled and having our lives fulfilled.
Stuffing myself with anything until numbness comes and time just passes harmlessly is not what I want anymore. Because keeping myself numb used to make pain, stress, discomfort, conflict, or any difficult situation even more difficult and painful, causing me to want to numb myself even more, stuff my balloon with water until one day it explodes, in a vicious cycle of unhappiness.
The story behind the piece of reflection
I had an interesting conversation with one of my friends from America the other day, who is also interested in philosophy, sociology, and observing others. We were discussing the suicide rates around the world, and why they were so high in Japan, where we live, or in other wealthy, socially developed countries, whereas they can be low in “poor” countries.
They have nothing to loose but their lives, and we just have so much to just loose.
Our lives in our first world countries tend to be rich, in many aspects. Most people don’t lack the basic things they need. A great number of us can afford to get what they want on top of what they need. Another few of us can even afford to have what they don’t really want.
We may even forget that a large chunk of the human population can’t get even the most basic commodities that we couldn’t think about living without.
It’s then easy to understand that people living in difficult conditions don’t think about ending their lives because staying alive is already difficult enough. Life is precious, valuable, and obviously survival is their main concern.
So why do people who can have almost everything end their life more easily? What kind of society is it in which individuals find it a better option to end their days than to keep on living? In my opinion, it is a society in which you can have so much that loosing anything seems like a disaster.
A society in which every balloon has their rubber stretched thin to its limit, cause we don’t know where and how to stop and turn the tap anymore.
Strong Curiosity 