First of all, I wish you a very happy
and peaceful new year 2020!
May the new year be a sunrise and
bring happiness and positivity to you.
In T. S. Eliot’s play, ‘The Cocktail
Party’, there is an interesting episode. One of the characters in this play was
not having a good time. She speaks to a psychiatrist about her unhappiness. And
she mentions that she hopes that somehow all her suffering is her own fault!
The psychiatrist asks her why she thinks so. She explains that if her suffering is her own fault,
she might be able to do something about it. But if it is God’s fault then she
is doomed!
This interesting incident looks
profound and can make us look at our own ways of dealing with unfavorable
conditions. Sometimes if things go against our wish, we have the tendency to
blame others and consider ourselves as a “pure victim”. While in many cases we
may actually be a victim, but we could still find ways to find “faults” in ourselves
using which we could correct our own behavior next time.
The easiest example that comes to my
mind is the instances or news of crime. A few days back while a husband and
wife were crossing the road around midnight, they were hit by an unidentified
car and the husband died. Was traveling so late in the night really necessary?
Could they have returned earlier; since darkness increases the chance of
accidents? Earlier there was a case of crime against a woman where the lady’s
scooter got flat tires and she trusted two unknown men and went with them for a
long distance in an unknown locality. Could she not have chosen to make a safer
decision and not to trust random men? In another incident, a young couple met
with a brutal crime because at 11 in the night they took “lift” from a private
bus. Why could not have they made a wiser decision? In matters of crime, of
course the crime happens due to criminals, but still many times the people at
the receiving end make unsafe decisions which lead them into becoming easy prey
of the criminals.
In other matters too, if a situation
is bad, we could still try to find faults i.e. improvement areas within us and
do self-correction; rather than putting entire blame on the other person or
party. If we think on these lines, there are endless opportunities in which we
can improve ourselves.
Therefore, we can say that our
tendency to put the entire blame on others bars us from using the unwanted incidents
as growth and learning opportunities. Because of our tendency to consider
ourselves 100% blameless and innocent, we lose a lot of opportunities where we
could have done some positive improvements in ourselves.
- Rahul Tiwary
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