Memory Lane: A Life Lesson from Chinese Handcuffs

Remember these? When I was a kid they were called Chinese Handcuffs. 

What I remember is that the harder you tried to pull your fingers out, 

the more they tightened their grip. Escape was easy if you knew how. 

How many of our own problems are like these simple finger traps?

 

While pondering this matter of "Chinese handcuffs" as a metaphor for many of life's problems, I decided to Google "Chinese handcuffs as metaphor" and discovered my idea was already incorporated into a therapeutic application. The first article I found is titled "What you can do when everything you try makes things worse."

The solution to many of our problems, according to this source, is ACT. That is, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Julian McNally writes: The Chinese Fingercuffs Metaphor is an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) intervention we use to help you approach that kind of problem in a way that can make a lasting difference – a transformation of the way you see the problem – not just a solution to it.

In 2013 the Portland Psychotherapy website published an article about these Chinese Finger Traps. Their article was titled "Chinese Finger Traps: What a Novelty Item Can Teach Us about Acceptance." As it turns out, this psychologist also practices and teaches Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. 

Near the conclusion he writes, When we accept, we let go of the struggle against what we’re feeling—in this very moment. In the next moment, we get a choice about what to do next. Acceptance frees us from the struggle with pain and allows for new possibilities. 

You can read the whole of Brian Thompson's article here.

 

* * * 

For the record, there are other kinds of handcuffs that aren't so easy to escape from. You can see photos of some of these on my blog post  titled The Handcuff Kings.

Meantime life goes on... 

An Antidote to Being One-Dimensional

Yesterday while working on a project my mind kept returning to a scene from Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. If you are unfamiliar with the story, it's a worthy read about youth and old age, good and evil. It is somewhat fantastical but has some good life lessons without being moralistic.

A carnival comes to town run by a Mr. Dark, and it is a dark carnival. The story centers on two teens, Will and Jim, and Will's father Jim. The seen I vividly recall, perhaps because when played in the film by Jason Robards it struck me so vividly, takes place in a hall of mirrors. I can't recall whether regret is the trap that captured all the other people lost in that labyrinth. What I recall is that Will's father, on his knees weeping, is wracked by regret because he has looked too deeply into the mirrors.

Here's the thought I had: when one looks into the mirror of one's acts--over a long lifetime of one's acts--it can be difficult, even loathsome, to look too deeply because of those moments where we have behaved badly or hurt people or acted stupidly so that we regret what we said or did. And that this regret is something akin to Chinese handcuffs. Did you ever stick your fingers into Chinese handcuffs when you were a kid? The first time children encounter these finger traps they think that you can escape by pulling, but the more you pull the more you are bound. It's deceptive, and counterintuitive. The path to freedom is to push in, hold it then wriggle your finger out.

This was my thought yesterday afternoon. The regret which Charles Halloway (Jason Robards) encountered in the Hall of Mirrors was a trap, a trap like Chinese handcuffs. It's deceptive because there is nothing you can do to change the past.

This image was brought to mind by one of the ten items in Parnell Thill's column One-Dimentional, which appeared earlier this year in the Pine Journal, the one instructing us to look in the mirror, which you will read below.

* * * *
Parnell Thill is currently Sr. Marketing Manager at AMSOIL INC., but has been an Adjunct Professor of Marketing at one of our local colleges and columnist since the mid-90s for the Cloquet Pine Journal, where this post originally appeared. This spring Parnell was honored as “Columnist of the Year” by the “Minnesota Newspapers Association” for his column, Notes from the Small Pond. His first book, Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks, is available on Amazon.com.

One-Dimensional
Guest Post by Parnell Thill

We are easily seduced. We believe we "get it" and understand the multitudinous and nuanced "Understanding of Things." We shake our heads at those that disagree on Facebook and change the channel to our own when we accidentally hear an opposing opinion. I've said this a thousand times because I'm old.

But seriously.

Here's 10 things to do that everyone should and no one will:

10. Shake the hand of a person who doesn't have a hand, but a hook or another prosthesis, and ask how the original equipment was lost. And listen. Write it down.

9. Interview the oldest person in your family. Ask them about their earliest memory and their most brutal/joyous. Write it down.

8. Go to Pine Valley after midnight and lay on your back in the snow or mud or grass with the wind or the mosquitoes or the ticks and look at the sky and wonder about what the same sky looked like in that exact spot 50 years ago. Five thousand years ago. Fifty thousand. Mind bend. Write it down.

7. Volunteer at a hospice. Be loving to the beloved. Write it down.

6. Find one of those old-school gumball machines and slide your nickel in and crank the dial to extract one of those purple, bumpy, grape gumballs that make your mouth pucker and sucker and douse your mouth with saliva to dilute the sugar your teeth hate. Thanks, evolution. Write it down.

5. Walk on crutches. Humbling. Not humiliating, but humbling. Write it down.

4. Start a fire with no matches or no lighter. It can be done and has been for 40,000 years but hasn't been for a hundred by anyone that anyone knows. Write it the hell down.

3. Eat raw protein, something that used to be swimming or climbing or running or hoping it wouldn't die, but did. Give in to your apex predator. Write it down.

2. Tell yourself the truth. Take a deep breath and stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself what you think of yourself. Chickens--t. Write it, loser.

1. Lie.

Cloquet resident Parnell Thill, former Pine Knot editor, has been penning his "Notes From the Small Pond" column for decades, or at least that's what it feels like. Contact him c/o news@pinejournal.com

Read more of Parnell's columns at the Pine Journal website.