When I look back on my life so far, I have to admit that there were periods when I felt as if I was on a roller coaster, feeling high up one day and then going way down to the bottom, then up again etc. etc.

It may mean that I like extremes in general. People around me may and may not notice this roller-coasting as I do not show much on my face - or maybe they do... Hmmm...

Incidentally toward the end of the last year I was having some thoughts on independence and dependence - these terms are not used in the psycho-analytical sense.

Independence here means that you can be content with all the resources you already have - including your physical body, your talents and capabilities, your time available, or your financial strength.

If you are independent, strictly speaking, you do not feel the need/necessity to be loved by a particular person, or you cannot live without the person, etc. because you can at least theoretically satisfy yourself with your existing resources.

Sometimes you may feel lonely or simply down, then you can tap into your resource basket to pull out, say, Christ who loves you unconditionally and who never leaves you. For this purpose, I have a drawing of Christ (in energetic form) standing in the middle of a forest shining everywhere. When I tune into the figure, then I feel loved and my energetic bodies are filled with light and warmth.

Of course, even on the day-to-day basis, you would be able to take very good care of yourself in terms of eating, cleaning, sleeping, self-discipline etc.

On the other hand, dependence is the state where you need a particular object, person, substance without which you feel insecure, worthless, unwilling to go on and so on. This includes not only dependency on alcohol, drugs, or gamble but also dependency on a particular person. In a typical high school love situation, this is what happens. You may lose the will to live and feel totally helpless when you are jilted by your boy/girl friend. Similar situations can occur in much later stages in life.

Ultimately if you believe you love somebody but want that person to be with you all the time, then that's not really unconditional love - especially if the other person does not become happy with you.

The biggest fear for such dependent person is to lose what you depend on. This is often the reason why people tend to sacrifise themselves, suppress their true emotions, simply to keep what you feel you cannot live without.

In human relationships, dependency leads to egoistic, selfish, "small" love while independence can lead to accepting, giving, unconditional love.

In an ideal situation, if each person in a partnership is indepenent, he/she can act just for the best interest of the other party and nothing else. The reality we observe, however, is quite contrary.

One thing I noted in this regard, is how much you try to be "independent" and whether you persist on it. If you try too hard to be what you believe to be independent, then you may feel uncomfortable with a partner who you feel is dependent on you, or you may feel guilty depending on others even when you can choose to accept their help/assistance/guidance.

If you really persist to remain "independent", that probably is not real independence, rather it may simply be the other side of "dependence" - meaning you may be simply suppressing emotions associated with your trauma in childhood, for example, hence you strive to be non-dependent, or you want to believe you're not relying on others. This is pretty much the same in essence as the very dependent people you avoid to be.

For instance if you feel you need somebody's help because you're undergoing a suffering in life, but you cannot ask for help because that's a "failure" in your eyes. You'd feel you failed to be the person you want to be.

Ultimately you can gracefully accept any help from others if you are certain you're an independent person. It is a matter of balancing too much dependence and in-dependence to be yourself. Given the extreme natures of myself as mentioned above, I thought I need to look further into this to find the right balance for each moment in my life.