OK,the title was kinda sorta flicked off a book's title...Which incidentally wasn't as politically correct as mine is.
On the first day of this new year,my husband suggested we read a book together. And it was this one- 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck- a Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life'.
The book, as reviews suggest, gives you a very frank appraisal on how life operates and as one website put it, helps one understand that if life gives you lemons,forget trying to make lemonade and try getting used to the taste of lemons. The sheer fact that we feel that life is unfair to us and we get in a pickle about it? The solution is to suck it up and move on! Genius!
But then it struck me that my problem is not that, as much as looking at people going about life blissfully unaware of how much more life has to offer but not having the wherewithal or even the interest to go after it. Case in point,we were out with people we know and when we said we wanted to eat a salad for lunch, they came up with Costco. Costco?! The wholesale behemoth? Where you buy everything, I mean everything, in bulk?! Can you possibly imagine the industrial sized salad they serve? Taste is not the criterion,size is...Supersize that is.
My husband and I were shocked and to make a long story short,we ate a a fancy Greek restaurant
where the water is served in pretty wine glasses and food comes in elaborate chinaware.
When people from back home who've lived here for years still stick to Indian food, we both find it annoying that after years in this country, people aren't open minded enough to try new cuisines.
Or we look at people who complain about high blood sugar, pop pills but pig out on whatever is put on their plate, and we roll our eyes. Why oh why, do they not adhere to a strict diet and stabilise their blood sugars?
Or we try watching some Shakespearean drama on TV and get flabbergasted when people roll their eyes at us, like we are the weird ones.
The word that came to mind when I thought about it today was- pretentious. I mean us. The fact that we measure people up on our yardstick and find them wanting. All of us do that kind of measuring, I know, but our yardsticks differ don't they? What might be a passing grade on my yardstick might be wildly successful on someone else's. And what might be mind bogglingly victorious on my yardstick might be 'mweh' on someone else's. So judging others on some arbitrary values we have come up with is not fair to them and at the end of the day, isn't beneficial to us either. Consider the number of true friends you might lose to those self appointed gatekeepers, the genuine people who might have made a positive difference in your life that you lost to those supposedly high standards you set for yourself and therefore assumed applies to everyone else. The uniqueness of being human is that within that uniquness is a far more deeper speciality- we are all different. Like how our fingerprints identify every single one of us as unique, our very nature, if quantifiable would prove how different each one of us is from each other. So setting a common standard for the entire human species is an absurdity. It also struck me that by someone else's yardstick, I might be severely wanting amd might be on the last rung of acceptance. That is a very difficult thing to accept, but that is what gave me that awareness of how petty and frankly childish my concept of 'standards' is.
The word that I'm thinking of is' judgemental' . So my new year resolution is to stop being judgemental. Like the bible says,"judge not and ye shall not be judged". And the word that I need to substitute is' acceptance' - short of unethical, immoral stuff, I'm going to be accepting of everyone I associate with. For in reality I am sure a lot of my friends and acquaintances put up with me not because of, but inspite of, my supposedly high ( read pretentious) standards!
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