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Sometimes You Have to Hold On in Order to Let Go

happy in(ter)dependence day!

Sometimes You Have to Hold On in Order to Let Go

This is going to be another metaphor post. Something I've been musing on for a while that, eyeballed the right way, metaphored appropriately, fits perfecly into the Independence Day discourse.
Sometimes you have to hold onto something in order to let something go.

Independence day? Or inTERdependence?

As reclusive as I'm drawn to be, no man, or woman, or alien-girl, is an island. Sure, I live alone, but I wouldn't be putting this out into the ether if you weren't there waiting to read it. Yes, I do mean you.  Meanwhile, I've been wretched of late over a scenario involving the scale, of which I may share more soon. And the accretal couldn't have happened were there no exchange of materials between myself and my environment. And on a different level of interdependence, I'd be handling the situation far less well were I not able to talk with my mom about it.

But back to the "hold on in order to let go."

"It's a dry heat," they say of Tucson in the summer. I've heard this intoned with so many different inflections, and I don't think I've quite picked up on all the nuances and backstories. Some people say it ironically, some sarcastically, some innocently, some gratefully. Sort of makes me wonder if there was some cult show for which it was the tagline and as usual I missed the spaceship.

The truth is, it's a desert so yes, the relative humidity in the atmosphere is typically low. As I write this, contrariwise, it's muggy and overcast. Summer monsoons. Lightning in the sky, crackling like an unproductive cough, no more than a spatter or two of rain yet. 

I love heat. I love dry. But I do not love electric shocks. I really don't like them. And when it's super dry, I've been apt to get a shock the first time I touch something metal--sometimes the car itself--whenever I get out of the car. The most insulting/injurious: I got out of a friend's car, the shape of which I was less familiar with, then reached back in to pull my bag out, and caught a shock on the boob! Literally a shock, and it hurt, and it disgusted me that my boob was big enough for a shock to reach it, so bad three ways.

I've found myself walking gingerly from the car with cloth over my hand, touching tentatively at whatever door I'm to open. Whenever you touch something, there's an exchange of electrons, a give and take. When I touch something and feel a shock (which happens more in dry conditions (also, ironically, in the freeze-dried cold of the Alaska winters I used to inhabit)), it's because I've been touching something else, my feet frictioning the floor of the car, its contact with the road. Touching and touching and touching, electrons in give-and-take, and then a critical mass, a critical difference with the next thing you touch=>shock/spark/electric current.

The car became the demon. Don't touch the car! Mine has no frames around the windows, so I'd carefully only touch the glass of the windows as I got out of the car.

It made me uncomfortable to find myself so avoidant. This static electricity is a kind of release. I want to be all about release! Why does letting go have to be painful? My metaphoring again. 

Rather than just resign myself to avoidance and the literal creation of a scenario of being afraid to touch door knobs, I consulted Professor Google. (It's literally true--the more I watched myself shying away from electric shocks, the more I could see myself developing an irrational fear of doors. Which is the whole behavior-modification principle of Pavlok. And, a fear of doors is a horrible metaphor, isn't it?)

Well, one suggestion I ran across on Google was to hold onto the door of your car as you get out and put your feet on the groundnot the same thing as get out of the car and then touch it and get shocked. The idea is that you're dissipating the charge built up from being in the car onto the car, and down into the ground, as you get out.

Argh! I don't want to touch my metal car and get a shock! But. Nonetheless. It made sense to me. So I gave it a try. 

Since I started doing that, I haven't had a single electric shock, and we had some dry-as-dry weather in there before the monsoon crackle started up.

So, I get to interdepend with extraneous electrons without getting too shocked. And if I hold onto the place where the charge built up, I'm able to dissipate the charge.

Where else might I be able to apply that in life?

Where else might the concept of critical mass apply versus a black and white on/off toggle?

About the Author

Ela Harrison

Ela is a wordsmith and herb lover who has lived in many places and currently resides in Tucson, AZ.

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