In a play park one day a little boy was nagging his parents to buy him a bunch of balloons from a stall.
“Dad, I love balloons and look, they are all in different colours”, he said. “May I please have them?” His father finally relented and bought his son a bunch of balloons.
On their way out of the play park a little blue balloon said to the others, “I am tired of being held down by a string.”
The big orange balloon replied, “You shouldn’t be tired because this is why you were made – to be blown up and held down by a string – and what is more, you should be glad that you have the opportunity to make a little boy happy.”
The yellow balloon overheard this and said, “Well, because we are filled with special air, all we want to do is go up, don’t we? It makes us wonder what is up there.”
“Nothing,” said one of the older balloons. “There is nothing but air up there.” “But if there is air in us and air up there, then it is just some more air,” argued the little blue balloon. “Perhaps we will be freer when we are up there.”
“No,” said the older balloon. “The pressure changes us if we go too high. We will burst up there.”
Still the blue balloon was not satisfied. “That’s not such a bad thing,” he said, “because then we will be one with the air and, seeing that we have air within us, all that we will be is ourselves.”
The yellow balloon interrupted by asking, “But what will happen to our latex capsule?”
“Well, I guess it will fall back to earth and be destroyed, but the good thing is that we won’t need it,” said the little blue balloon.
“But how will you ever get the boy to let go of us? He is our owner now, remember.”
A moment passed and the little blue balloon said, “Let’s ask him!”
“And how will we do that?” the silver balloon asked as all the balloons were becoming kind of excited about this idea of going up into the sky and becoming one with who they already were rather than separate in their colourful latex capsules.
“Well,” said the little blue balloon, “we are in the boy’s hand and his hand is linked to his arm and his arm to his shoulder and his shoulder to his neck and his neck to his head and his head has ears on it, so we will just send him a message through our strings and, if it is true that we all are one, he should get the message, right?”
“Okay,” said the red balloon. “Let’s send that message.”
A millisecond later the little boy looked up at the balloons, opened his hand and let them go. His dad tried to grab them but they were gone. He looked at the child and said, “Why did you do that?”
The little boy smiled and said: “Because they asked me to.”
l Contact Rinus le Roux at rinus@ucan.co.za
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