Overloving

THINK PAD

Routine, while essential, traps one in a vicious cycle of monotony, causing one to go through life like a robotic performer. As I ponder this, I walk towards my neighbourhood park, reluctantly accepting that for a balanced lifestyle, we must maintain contact with nature, people, and have athletic outlets. We must learn to look past ourselves and our lives, catch our breath, and process our emotions to become better people.

I walk for a while until I reach my deserted bench under swaying trees that seem as ancient as time. Their roots grasp onto the earth like claws, with an almost vicious sense of firmness and stability, and the leaves above dance with the wind to a tune of their own making. With a forgotten book in my hand and salted crisps coating my tongue, I observe a father adorably picking his child up and putting him on the top of the slanted slide. The father takes his hands off and the baby swings down, screaming with joy and laughter. Before his feet touch the ground, the dad picks up the elated baby and places him back up again. The boy shrieks with laughter and continuously demands that he be picked up and pushed down the bright yellow slides, and the father does not disappoint – his firm, patient hands repeating the gesture with ease. I find that so admirable. The unconditional love of fathers for their children is always underrated but, at times, it is our beloved’s ‘overlove’, which is damaging for us both.

As the child begins to wail so that he can be allowed onto the swings, my thoughts shift gears to the structure of playgrounds and how they’re designed with a very calculated effort-reward system: a child uses his energy and climbs up the stairs to the top; what he gets for accomplishing that is flying in the air which gives him a boost of dopamine. Out of love, we at times keep giving these shots of dopamine to our most dear ones without any effort. This increases the size of their dopamine receptors and they end up wanting more and more next time. It’s like cigarettes – it can never be “just one”.

The best kind of joy is the one that is striven for. Reward without effort creates a tendency to expect without giving and becomes too reliant. The world is built upon the foundation of cause and effect. One thing leads to another, which is why the smallest of incidents can have a domino effect on other aspects of one’s life.

This system of reward and benefit is ingrained in the smallest of things around us. Let’s take magazines, for example. Depending on the genre, it usually starts with smaller reviews and writings, then The Green Rooms bring a break, which is then followed by the cover story. Lastly, the most desired Comic Relief arrives towards the end as a reward. Can we compare the impact of this between someone who walks through all these stages to reach the end and someone who only reads the last two pages?

So while parents may question how their children grow to become spoilt, the answer is evident that it’s through granting their children whatever they desire until they grow to become disobedient adults with no concept of hard work and effort; that comes together as a society which expects results with little or no hard work at all. That, paired with false hopes and expectations, only leads to more disappointment.

After all, we are all familiar with the story of the person who cuts the shell of a caterpillar due to sympathy and ends up doing more damage than good to the butterfly; rather it completely deprives the butterfly by not letting its wings go through that hard training.

What’s vital is to set limits for yourself and others. There should be a limit to materialistic items and one’s amount of love as well. Overindulging love is something that suffocates anyone in a relationship, be it parents and children, or spouses and even friends.