To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Friday, May 10, 2019
 

I feel a bit disturbed though the reason for my disturbance or a gnawing mental discomfort is not apparent to even myself at the moment. I realise that I usually get drawn to writing a blog when I am in this sort of state…I guess I have since childhood resorted to ‘writing’ when I wanted to work out my inner conflicts and this is my way of teasing out what is really bothering me, if not of actually reaching a sort of calm for having let it all out.
In the last 2-3 days, a few incidents occurred which were quite minor in themselves but put together have made me question not so much the incidents but my own way of dealing with them or more specifically my tendencies to get ‘emotionally agitated’ for such type of minor things. Among these tendencies, one relates to the fact that I don’t feel ‘good’ at all if I have to refuse to do a favour for someone, or to distil this even further, I don’t feel good at all if I have to disappoint someone. The reason I say ‘I have to’ is because given my tendency to ‘not feel good’ when I disappoint someone (the disappointment would be higher the more I care about the person but it would be significant even if the person was just known to me in a positive way), I generally try ‘not to disappoint’ in the sense that if there is a favour or help asked of me from a known person, I will usually oblige if it’s within my remit. If ‘I have to’ refuse or deny the request it would have to be a strong enough reason for me. Sometimes or many a times I have gone out of my way to do favours or help people even at a great cost to myself but now I try to take more of a balanced view and consider myself and my constraints a bit more. I also consider if the request is a reasonable one in the sense that I am ‘helping’ someone and not ‘doing the job’ that they should be doing themselves. While all these considerations are reasonable and I can’t fault myself at all when I am in a position where I ‘have to’ disappoint someone, I’m not sure how to deal with the ‘aftereffects’ of it… where instead of happily going about my life I launch into brooding about the whole thing, feeling guilty, and wondering if I should have done something after all. It defeats the whole purpose of taking a stand if I can’t seem to be convinced that it was the right thing to do. I have also noticed that I make much more of the disappointment of the other party in my own head than they themselves do in reality! They might forget about it or go about their business (and accept my reasons at face value with no hard feelings) but I seem to not be able to stop thinking about their problem.
I feel that even if it’s a nice attitude to want to help people or not disappoint them if I can help it, it essentially needs to be ‘managed’ such that I don’t feel ‘personally responsible’ for other people’s problems or solutions. I think my inability to mentally and emotionally extricate myself from the situation shows that I seem to take some sort of personal responsibility for the problem and its resolution even though I have nothing to do with it except that I have been approached for help. Needless to say, this type of involvement can’t be good for me.
I wonder if what really worries me is the thought that people would like me less for not doing something for them…which I guess is a rather skewed way of thinking because if people were attached to me because of what I did or did not do for them (rather than for who I am) then such attachment would be quite precarious and not worth sustaining anyway. I also wonder if our sense of personal goodness pivots a bit around how others might perceive us and we want to maintain this external perception at any cost to maintain our own internal perception of who we are which again seems like an illogical thing to do… I guess the more internally rooted our sense of goodness is and the less we need external certification for its validity, the more we would be able to assert our goodness objectively or choose actions because they are the right ones and not because they make people happy or disappoint them. Easier said than done?
 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 2:10 am 0 comments
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