The time I wanted to be a Leaf Node 🍀

A couple of weeks ago, I went on a trip with some colleagues. People who I had only interacted remotely and only had a formal, strictly professional conversation based relationship. Conversations filled the days we had spent together and we all got to know about each other. Usually, however, I noticed that a lot of my conversations ended with “Don’t tell this to anyone else” with one-on-one conversations with them.

Going past the nostalgia phase when school friends used to tell us the same thing after blabbering something silly about themselves or others. This was maybe different.

This was different because of the way we would handle this as an adult. So, in that instant I though of the leaf node, and how I wanted to be the leaf node.

Yes, I am talking about the Binary Tree / n-ary Tree Leaf Node

A refresher primer on leaf-node ☘️

Consider a system of your friends, acquaintances, friends and acquaintances of your friends, and moving forward. Everyone here is a node including the root, which is you. The directional arrows represent the flow of conversations, let’s say a secret ‘S’ whose originator is root. A leaf node is the node where the propagation of ‘S’ terminates. (Marked in Green)

What I mean by being a leaf node is being the keeper of secret ‘S’ and not propagating. Or being the terminating node.

Just putting this as a concept out there. I resonate with being a leaf node, who do you resonate with?