Motive soup

Influence.

About a minute ago I was thinking about the word itself and I may be onto to something.

'Fluence' is simply some derivative of the latin for flow, right? I'm looking up the root right now.

Apparently, a webpage from some secondary school in Washington state will back me up.

So then influence as a verb is the act of flowing into something. To influence someone, you flow into them. And to be influenced by someone, you let them flow into you. And to succumb to influences, all one must do is go with the flow.

What brought this all up is that I've been wondering what role I'm playing or I'm even trying to play in the lives of the people I know. The whole bit's kinda frustrating, really. Is my desire to alter the trajectories of friends and fam, supposedly for the better, really just another form of the chronic attention-seeking that I've always suffered from? If it is, what do I do about it? Seriously, it's a burning moral question, is it possible for me to be visible and humble at the same time? It seems at first that there's a simple answer, but then you think about what it would look like when you're just living life, shootin' the breeze with some people in a random entryway in a random building and you come up with the best damn joke in the world. On one hand, you know that your motives for telling the joke might not be up to code, but on the other, if you hold it in, you're depriving your fellow participants of gut-wrenching laughter, literally stealing that amazing moment from them.

Maybe for me, my problem isn't the wanting to be seen, my problem is the terms and conditions that I attach. Because sometimes, I really don't want to be seen. Last week was an academic pressure-cooker for me. It might be the thing I hate most about school: the constant realization that any person, pick any person, from my circle of friends or acquaintances is great and all, but they sure as hell won't help me rock my stat theory midterm. That's up to me and the empty seats on either side of me as I study in the SPH student commons, conveniently sitting two stories underground where cell-phone reception is completely implausible.

So here's the hypothesis: if people were more important to me, I would be more important to them. I'm not saying I should give up on my master's degree, that's all good and everything. But it's unreasonable to ask for a larger share of the hearts of those around you if you plan to vacate whenever is most convenient for you. To bring this full circle, influence is a giving of oneself, in some form or another. And constant influence, in the form that I want anyhow, means constant self-giving.

And the rest is best left undisturbed for now, I think.