Difficulties of dealing with our own element

How does the Fire element make me feel?  This is a more difficult question than when I ask myself how the other elements make me feel, because here I am confronting my own element, and dealing with one’s own element presents challenges and risks all of their own.  One would think that its very familiarity to me would make me feel far more at ease, but oddly this is at the same time both a true and a false assumption. 

In a way I am very easy in the presence of Fire because I can relax and express my enjoyment of life with those who enjoy similar things.  But I find that I am also irritated by just those familiar qualities in other Fire people that irritate me in myself.  So my contacts with Fire are not always the unalloyed delight one might expect them to be.

In looking at the elements over the years I have often learnt a great deal from studying them in those closest to me, my family and friends, as many of us do.  We cannot choose our families, but we do of course definitely choose our partners, and thereby hangs many a tale about our relationship to the other elements.  We also choose our friends.  Unless we have moved from partner to many other partners over the years, our choice of friends will provide us with the largest selection of those we like to be with.  We are likely to have accumulated more friends than partners, and thus have a larger choice from which to learn more about the elements at close hand, and more specifically, to explore what it is about particular elements that has attracted us sufficiently to select them as people whose companionship we enjoy.  For me it has been a fascinating exploration which has yielded surprising results, all of which has taught me a lot about particular elements in general and about my own element in particular. 

I have therefore used myself as a productive tool of learning, which we should all do if we are to deepen our understanding of what distinguishes one element from another.