The question that begs to be asked

So my question today is, how do you keep the balance between spilling out all your thoughts in one go when you can't hold them in any longer, to your friends or whoever happens to be around you, and, holding everything inside and not letting anything out at all so that people forget you're around sometimes?

A related question would be, how much de-stressing can you safely do before you turn into a garbage truck, but instead of collecting the rubbish, you are dumping it out onto those around you?

The reason I ask, is because we all feel stressed from time to time and it seems most helpful to talk it out with someone who can calmly sift through your emotional rantings and can piece together your fragmented words and give them back to you in the form of a more complete and logical picture of the situation you are having trouble facing.

Hypothetically speaking, let's say there is a limit to the amount of barraging words we can safely dump into the ears of our patient friends or family. And let's say that one day we reach that limit.

Now, the other question that begs to be answered is, what should be said to the friend who finally holds up his hands in mock surrender and says, "I am sorry, I can no longer take anymore. From now on, I can only handle (#) of minutes of your troubles, after that you need to stop." Now is this friend setting a boundary, and is this a logical boundary, or is this friend no longe a 'true' friend who is there to listen and help and support?

Perhaps there are many answers to these questions. Perhaps you have felt you were both: the dumpee and dumper, or perhaps you are more prone to fall into one of the two categories. The reason I bring it up is because I was just hit with the realisation today of how powerful the combination of words and emotions put together can be on those around us. A simple sentence like, "Do you believe me?" can be a calm, direct question, or it can turn into a piercing accusation, all depending on how you deliver the words. You can deliver a clear message or you can deliver a whole package of bits and pieces of emotions and feelings that the listener has to sort through before being able to give an answer, that is, providing the speaker pauses long enough to take any incoming information in.

Sometimes we can be like radios - always talking, always giving out information, always running. And someimes we can be like answering machines, the only thing we say is "hello...." and then the rest of the time we take in information, spitting it out when asked for a recounting of the past.

Perhaps a valuable lesson I learned today was how powerful words combined with emotions can be, and important it is to carefully balance the two when freely sharing them with others. Perhaps there is wisdom in carefully considering what we say before we say it, weighing the consequences and the possible effects our words will have on our hearers. Perhaps we don't do this enough.

On a different note, today was my first field trip, and I took my older students out to a bookstore to do an English treasure hunt :) It was quite fun. All the questions I had painstakingly written over the course of two Sunday afternoons, were finally put to good use. Except, I had missed one vital detail in my planning... let this lesson not be wasted on just my experience - but let the reader learn from my mistakes! Check the time that the bookstore opens, BEFORE planning your field trip.... we arrived 1.5 hours early, and had only budgeted half a day for the trip... needless to say, I was disappointed that my hour-long project shrank to a 20-minute-mad-dash, where even my students were asking me "can't we stay longer?" (music to an English teacher's ears when you're in a bookstore working on a learning project :)

Well, you live and learn, and I learned to be prepared for details like opening times... and I learned that I could trust these students, like I had suspected; and I learned that I really enjoyed this type of teaching/learning! The trip went so smoothly, and I arrived back at school refreshed and eager to continue my day! I couldn't stop smiling :)

Well if I want to smile tomorrow perhaps I should think about getting some sleep soon...

Until nex time,

- R