We get irritated, angry, or protective if someone else abuses/ disrespects/ takes for granted, or even comments about the person we love. We would have done that ourselves a minute back or a day before. But that’s okay! We do it out of love. How can someone else do that? We get territorial. We have the right to abuse them – because of the privilege we have given them – to get loved by us. We have the right to ill-treat them or take them for granted because it comes from a place of love. So, it won’t affect them. But others? No way! They don’t even know this person well enough, let alone love, to be able to comment on them and get away with it.
Why do we do that? Is it because we feel guilty for abusing them that we try to make up for it by getting angry at others who do that? Since we can’t change ourselves, we try to make up for our sins by calling others, sinners? It makes us less of a sinner by doing so? It reduces the impact of our insult since we protected them against someone else?
Despite all the love, we don’t have the patience. Despite all the love, we don’t spare an extra minute to understand or explain. But we expect others to do all that with much less love and concern than we claim ourselves to have.
That’s a very strange idea of justice and redemption, isn’t it? We don’t try to become saints but get angry at others and actively call them sinners. So that in comparison to them, we appear less evil! Quite fantastic this mind of ours – we manipulate ourselves more than we manipulate anyone else ! And that manipulation, we call love!
We kid ourselves to believe that all our comments leave no negative impact since it comes from a place of love. While outsider’s comments can damage them? The big news is – Our casual comments cause more damage than any outsider’s intentional actions. Do you know why? Because of our love! They take us more seriously! An outsider’s comment, they can brush off without much thought. But an insider’s goes inside their heart directly. That’s why there’s more damage at close quarters than a war outside the house can ever cause.
It’s time we pay attention to our so-called casual comments, our mild irritation, and our loving anger, to truly see the damage we are causing. No point getting angry on outsiders when the insiders themselves fail to respect and value what they have. How can we expect someone else with half of our love, respect them more than double what we do? This could be true not just of humans, but also of our country, resources, our own selves too. We get angry at someone for commenting on us because somewhere we believe it is true, or we fear it is true. Otherwise, it wouldn’t affect us. We want others to love us, accept us, and take care of us. But we don’t do that ourselves. We abuse ourselves the most. Hence, any little thing that the outsider does, hits us like a cannonball!
The bottom line is, we can’t expect anyone outside of us to do anything that we aren’t doing ourselves. We can have a zillion reasons for what we are – but they are just excuses. We think our reasons provide a source of entitlement for ourselves to get away with murder even. But nothing can take away the effect of your actions unless you consciously change your actions. It is not tough to change provided, we stop hiding behind our reasons. The minute we say, ‘it is tough to change’, ‘anger just comes to me’ – that means we are feeling comfortable being what we are. We have made peace with ourselves for being however sluggish we are. And that is doom’s day for us! Life will never change for the better. This age-old quote never runs out of fashion – “Where there’s a will, there’s a way!” Anything that we have been trying to change but couldn’t, we just haven’t wanted it strong enough. The day we want it like we can’t live another moment without it – change will naturally happen! The time and energy we spend in trying to protect others from others, if we spend in trying to protect them from ourselves, I am sure we’ll change. Won’t we?
Very deep, insightful…like a research paper