“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
:Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Had I the money and the authority and the directions to the nearest showroom that sells military tanks loaded with ammunition; I would have bought it that day!
Okay! Let me explain. Recap, shall we?
I usually ride my scooter (which when I sit on it looks embarrassingly puny and personally feels like sitting on the back of a cat and twisting its ears for an accelerator; comfortable and with ample storage space though) to and from work and my evening classes.
When I leave for work its early morning and when I get home it gets late, so I usually have to face very little traffic.
The only time I am worried about the traffic is when I have to get to my classes from work.
I try to avoid busy and traffic intensive roads so much so that I take a 2-3 km long detour just not to get my demophobia induced anxiety.
The commute is supposed to be my time for solitude. The riding almost always happens as if I’m on autopilot which frees up my mind to think. That’s when I turn my zen-mode on and let my mind wander. And I was deprived of that.
So here’s what happened that day.
Classes were off and I was heading straight to home from work. It was around 17:30. Rush hour. Monsoon season and I see Nimbostratus looming above ready to pour down on me to add to my misery.
Now coping with too small of a street, filled with more puddles than the number of vehicles, that are dug up everywhere, torn up tarmac and pieces of gravel lying around, is a task on its own. (Apparently you are supposed to give a “stones and puddles dodging test” every time you hit the road.)
To add to that, the dust covered roads are full of assholes behind the wheels of public vehicles; extremely slow moving tuk-tuks; pretentious guys, going zig-zag on a straight road on their ear numbing dirt bikes, for god knows why?
People talking on their phones in their cars are a common site. But a guy in a three piece suit, on his bike, while moving, had his one had on the accelerator and with the other one, was typing on his phone.
(How can you not have the urge to stop such morons, and have their phone shredded, with a sledge hammer, while forcing them to hold onto their phones while you do so?)
Imbecile pedestrians with earphones on, looking at their phones.
(Evidently listening to music is more important than you being able to hear the truck honking its horns off behind you while you walk on the street or cross the road so as to not be crushed by an incoming vehicle. I agree that music has healing powers, I may be wrong but I don’t think it can cure death.)
“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
:George Carlin (one of the greatest satirical stand-up comedians)
I wanted to be “Tommy” from “GTA Vice City” so bad. If it were only possible to say “Panzer” and to have a huge tank fall out of the sky. I would have gone on a rampage, a killing rampage. Just like this:
Okay! I admit I tend to over-exaggerate stuff way out of proportion (Dr.Critic is to blame).
You may say “What you mentioned is just an everyday struggle of the denizens of this city. What’s the big fuss?”
Now here’s the truth. All the emotional outbursts that I had, as mentioned above are just hypotheticals.
Having said that, this is what an average Joe feels like when stuck in such situations. In such scenarios people usually get angry and annoyed. And it affects their general mood and they get grumpy when they get home or to work.
Man is an emotional being, and emotions make us who we are. But here’s the issue. Things don’t always go your way, and in life too you do not always get rainbows and unicorns. You don’t always have control over circumstances or the people around you.
As it is often said “Mind is a great servant but a terrible master”.
So when things are not going as per your desires, do you surrender to your emotions and be its slave. It’s easy to act on impulses rather than wisdom. If going with your animalistic instinct is what you do then what’s the point of having cognitive reasoning and intelligence and awareness?
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
— Seneca
Borrowing and paraphrasing words from “This is Water”, 2005 Commencement Speech delivered at Kenyon College by one of the greatest intellectual mind and a literary genius “David Foster Wallace”:
The real freedom and education is not your capacity to think but the choice of what you think and how you think.
Your “Default Setting” is to be frustrated and self centered, to think that everybody is in your way, and all that matters is your hunger and your fatigue and your desire to just get home.
What is at the centre of the universe? Regardless of what science says, it is the self!
(It’s cheesy that I am quoting myself, but meh!)
But the capital T-truth is that you get to decide whether to operate on you “Default-Setting” and be selfish and be pissed at those uncomfortable trenches of daily existence
OR
Do you choose to overcome unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”?
So instead of making everything about “Me, My and Myself”. Here’s how to think!! Watch this and you have no need to read this article further:
This is water! This is water!
Here’s the full speech if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
Personally I too think you should not be controlled by emotions. You should, for the most part, have dominion over the emotions and not the other way around. And I think common sense should always prevail petty emotions.
Keeping your emotions in check is one part of the equation. Dealing with people is another.
Such hypotheticals make me wonder though.
How’d you deal with frustrating people?
And as I often do, I turned to books to find the answers! And boy did I find one.
Dealing with people: The Stoic way!
Stoicism is the ancient philosophy founded by Zeno in the 3rd century BC, later adopted from an Emperor Marcus Aurelius to a slave Epictetus, both great philosophers.
What is stoicism?
Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions. It does not seek to extinguish emotions competely, but rather seeks to transform them which enables a person to develop clear judgment, inner calm and freedom from suffering (which it considers the ultimate goal). [http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_stoicism.html]
Of the number of times that I have read the book “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius, the most influential stoics in the history, it was only just recently, when I had the chance to sit and deliberately think about its teachings.
And one lesson in particular, on how to deal with people.
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly (and selfish). They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Now! Now! Before judging the great man and his teachings and say “WTF! Narcissist! So everybody else is flawed but you?”
The moral lies here “But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.”
Yeah! People are generally ignorant and stupid and foolish. But..
Acknowledging that fact that the very people I meet daily, are no different that I am. They too are genetically primed to be selfish, just as I am. They too are slaves to their emotion, just as I am.
Only thing to keep mind is that you have to become the wiser one. For you know that they are unconscious, and you are to be awakened. They are slave to their mind but you are to be its master. They are bound by their emotions but you are to be free.
So next time someone overtakes you on the road, just consider this that may be he is in a hurry to get to the hospital, where his kin lies sick. May be you are on his way.
Next time you see someone on the phone while driving, may be he is consoling his child who feel down and hurt himself and now is crying to be with daddy.
May be just may be, the guy with the huge headphones, is listening to soothing music so as to suppress his own anxiety, and it is not easy for him to be on a crowded road either.
May be the lady that jumped across you vehicle to cross the road is in a hurry to get home, and is trying not to miss the last bus, or else she gets an ear full from her mean mother-in-law. May be you are being selfish to her by not letting her pass.
And as DFW said; “Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider……..Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you’re “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it’s hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you’re like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat-out won’t want to.”
But….But….I leave you with this,
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.
— This is Water, David Foster Wallace.
