On a special occasion, a young man was given a toy called the “zapper.” The zapper seemed like a fun gadget at first: It lit up brightly and seemed impressive. The young man loved his zapper. He took it everywhere with him. He showed everyone who would look at it. Soon enough, he would define himself as the “boy who owned the zapper.” But something predictable started happening after the young man used his zapper for a month: He would get shocked every time he held it.
The young man had already attached himself to his zapper and fast defined himself by his possession of it, so despite the zapper constantly hurting him, he refused to put it down. Soon enough, he would complain to others about how much it hurt to hold this zapper, but when others suggested that he put it down, he grew angry. “I am not getting rid of this! I can’t! It’s mine!” he would say. Still, the zapper zapped him every day; and still, he refused to let it go.
When others suggested to the boy that he should try to get his toy fixed, he immediately denied that it was really a problem. “It doesn’t hurt that badly,” he would say. So on the boy went, continually holding onto a toy that hurt him, until, eventually, even he realized that the zapper did him more harm than good, and the boy decided he should put it down.
A week went by. The boy grew sad without his zapper. He felt like he had lost a part of himself.
The next week, the boy couldn’t stop thinking about how much he missed his zapper and about how cool the lights were on it when he first got it, and about how awesome it was before it started shocking him. He allowed these thoughts to consume him, and he missed his zapper so much that he decided to pick it back up at once. Of course, the moment he did, the zapper shocked and hurt him, and he quickly remembered why he’d put it down in the first place.
By this point, the boy was willing to get help; so he took his zapper to get fixed. The fixer-of-things told the young boy, however, that zappers can never return to their original form, and that, “to hold onto something that is hurting you while wishing for it to be different than it is, is foolish.”
This story is not about a zapper, or a boy. It’s about you and me. It’s about everything we hold onto in our lives that’s not good for us. It’s about us wanting things to be magically different than they are. It’s about not accepting the reality that some things are simply not good for us, even though we want them to be. We all hold onto things that are harmful for us in some way. So the real question for you to take away from this story is this: “How long will you hold onto the zappers in your own life before accepting the truth: you are better off without them?”