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Agents, Actors, and Allies
Dec. 8th, 2007 10:49 amA friend of mine made a rather interesting post this morning, so this is for him, since it reminded me of a little essay I wrote on the subject a while back. Excerpt follows.
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In our lives, people take on different roles. Though these roles are varied, there are two factors that make it easy to codify their effect on us – duration and change.
There is a saying, “People enter our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” In light of this, I think of people in one’s life as Agents, Actors, and Allies. Each is important in their own way.
Agents enter our lives, initiate change, and move on. They may be in our life for a day, a week, or a decade, but the common factor is that as soon as they deliver their change to our lives, they move on and we rarely hear from them again. It is common for agents to become best friends, lovers, or even marriage partners. But after they initiate change in our lives, they’re gone like the wind.
Actors are people who deliver little change, but they’re companions for a while. They can vary from casual acquaintances to close friends. They’re comfortable, not challenging, and they’re where we often go for a good cry or to relax. If they leave our lives, they fade away, slowly moving out of our orbit. It is very difficult to differentiate between Actors and Agents until the end of the close association, as often Agents look like Actors until they deliver their payload.
Allies are a different breed. Once someone gains an ally, they’re there until death. Marrying an ally is a mixed blessing, however, because Allies challenge us, bring change, and also provide comfort when we need it. An Ally is the one who will tell us, when we’re broken hearted from a recent relationship failure, that we were dumb for getting together with that person in the first place, and them saying this won’t make us hate them for it. Allies are rare.
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I find that this a normative pattern for just about everyone, so it's probably something coded into source for society. I haven't studied interactional patterns for non-human societies, so I can't say this authoritatively, but I find that this is one of the areas where expectations and a lack of understanding on how the system is designed to work causes a lot of waste heat in the system
Again, the Mantra: "Expectations decrease joy." Since we can't know which interactional style a person in our life will fulfill, there's no real way to know what impact they will have on our lives. As a result, we have to react if everyone was just a person with no expectation on what they will bring to our lives. Usually pain, which I tend to think of as emotional noise, results from expecting someone in one role to be another. Most people expect everyone to be an Ally if they're someone dedicated to growth and forward motion and to be an actor if they're a fairly complacent person, though with an ally's duration in their life. (Main cast?) This is neither reasonable if one understands the full workings of the system nor desirable. We need agents to bring change to our lives, and also the soft pillow of the Actor along with the challenge of the Ally.
It is important enough that I will reiterate it -- These different types sometimes masquerade as each other, especially agents. In fact, usually we don't know someone is an agent until the triggering situation occurs and they vaporize. It's possible to marry an agent and live with them for thirty years, then suddenly have the catalytic moment and they go Poof! It's disconcerting, but that's often from the expectation that they were going to be around "forever".
So, what do we do? Be ourselves. Live life honestly, genuinely, and treat every person in our lives as someone who is here right now, with no expectations for tomorrow. Living in the future is just as damaging as living in the past, except that it's all vapor. Accept that the true intrinsic value of each person's presence in your life is about right now, not tomorrow, and revel in that company. And know that they will eventually go away, as all things physical do on this plane. It's a fact of living in this reality, and so far nothing has changed that fact. Live your life, love your lovers, revel in and accept your friends and acquaintances, and enjoy what it brings now, and when it ends things will go much better because the expectations of permanence, (which aren't reasonable) aren't there.
---
In our lives, people take on different roles. Though these roles are varied, there are two factors that make it easy to codify their effect on us – duration and change.
There is a saying, “People enter our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” In light of this, I think of people in one’s life as Agents, Actors, and Allies. Each is important in their own way.
Agents enter our lives, initiate change, and move on. They may be in our life for a day, a week, or a decade, but the common factor is that as soon as they deliver their change to our lives, they move on and we rarely hear from them again. It is common for agents to become best friends, lovers, or even marriage partners. But after they initiate change in our lives, they’re gone like the wind.
Actors are people who deliver little change, but they’re companions for a while. They can vary from casual acquaintances to close friends. They’re comfortable, not challenging, and they’re where we often go for a good cry or to relax. If they leave our lives, they fade away, slowly moving out of our orbit. It is very difficult to differentiate between Actors and Agents until the end of the close association, as often Agents look like Actors until they deliver their payload.
Allies are a different breed. Once someone gains an ally, they’re there until death. Marrying an ally is a mixed blessing, however, because Allies challenge us, bring change, and also provide comfort when we need it. An Ally is the one who will tell us, when we’re broken hearted from a recent relationship failure, that we were dumb for getting together with that person in the first place, and them saying this won’t make us hate them for it. Allies are rare.
---
I find that this a normative pattern for just about everyone, so it's probably something coded into source for society. I haven't studied interactional patterns for non-human societies, so I can't say this authoritatively, but I find that this is one of the areas where expectations and a lack of understanding on how the system is designed to work causes a lot of waste heat in the system
Again, the Mantra: "Expectations decrease joy." Since we can't know which interactional style a person in our life will fulfill, there's no real way to know what impact they will have on our lives. As a result, we have to react if everyone was just a person with no expectation on what they will bring to our lives. Usually pain, which I tend to think of as emotional noise, results from expecting someone in one role to be another. Most people expect everyone to be an Ally if they're someone dedicated to growth and forward motion and to be an actor if they're a fairly complacent person, though with an ally's duration in their life. (Main cast?) This is neither reasonable if one understands the full workings of the system nor desirable. We need agents to bring change to our lives, and also the soft pillow of the Actor along with the challenge of the Ally.
It is important enough that I will reiterate it -- These different types sometimes masquerade as each other, especially agents. In fact, usually we don't know someone is an agent until the triggering situation occurs and they vaporize. It's possible to marry an agent and live with them for thirty years, then suddenly have the catalytic moment and they go Poof! It's disconcerting, but that's often from the expectation that they were going to be around "forever".
So, what do we do? Be ourselves. Live life honestly, genuinely, and treat every person in our lives as someone who is here right now, with no expectations for tomorrow. Living in the future is just as damaging as living in the past, except that it's all vapor. Accept that the true intrinsic value of each person's presence in your life is about right now, not tomorrow, and revel in that company. And know that they will eventually go away, as all things physical do on this plane. It's a fact of living in this reality, and so far nothing has changed that fact. Live your life, love your lovers, revel in and accept your friends and acquaintances, and enjoy what it brings now, and when it ends things will go much better because the expectations of permanence, (which aren't reasonable) aren't there.
