Money! Sex! Health!

Do you take the burden of the world upon you shoulders? Do you find it hard to say no? Do you think if you don’t help someone they will suffer, wither and die? Do random and often able-bodied beggars on the road make your eyes moist? Do you suffer from a good-person complex?

Read on. 

2012 is the year of  many epiphanies.  I learnt things that no MBA or CPR could teach. Life is the greatest teacher of all, needless to say. And here I share this gem, the biggest learning of them all.

DONOT BE USED.

The title is misleading, I confess. I read somewhere that the following three words (‘money’, ‘sex’ and ‘health’) are attention grabbing. So I used them to grab your attention and perhaps these ares are where people often find themselves used.

Compassionate people (type A for the purpose of this piece) are a rare breed indeed in today’s world. Or so we may think. There’s another type of people- the kind that manipulate (type B), play mind games, dangle carrots in front of hungry ponies or play on people’s insecurity.  These abound.    And often, given the kind of relationship in question, we switch types. I believed that I could be a Type B, if you pushed it, but several financial and emotional losses later I discovered I was a softie, a stupid Type A. More often than not, people walked all over me, only for me to realize later that I had been wronged. More often than not, these people came in the garb of ‘friends’! Shocking? Not really. 

A surprising number of us continue to allow ourselves to be taken advantage of.  What is it that we fear? That rejecting someone’s nearly unreasonable request would make us look bad? Should we care how we look? Shouldn’t the people making these demands be considerate? Should we care if people who don’t care about us yet judge us? Shouldn’t our peace of mind or our own conscience be a sacred thing?  The answers are obvious.
:-D

In a micro sense, it sounds like a tiny problem. But it’s the same fear of disapproval that makes mere witnesses out of the masses. It’s huge. A survey proved that while most people may not be evil, when they feel ‘left out’ or under self-created ‘pressure’, they allow maliciousness to pervade. This is what makes Nazis out of humans.

(The Type B’s eventually self-destruct. Hitler shot himself in the brain. )

The thing is, there is no wisdom in walking on your knees to make spiritual pygmies feel taller, or becoming a door mat.  Any sentence that starts with “hey, I need a favour,” should be passed through the litmus test twice. Often, our gut feeling in such situations is right, since preservation is an instinct.

It all boils down to what you think courage is. To me, a Gandhi is a symbol of strength. Its takes a strong, strong man to turn the other cheek.  And this wasn’t his idea by the way; it was published way before his time in a book called ‘The Bible’;-p

The point I am trying to make is compassion is the only way to live. Those that mistake your niceness for weakness are fools that are slowly digging their own grave. (Please read my other blog-post, In loving memory of the living.) They are not worth it anyway.  Something that aligns me to the correct path here is the Vedic description of a person of God; ‘softer than a flower where kindness is concerned, stronger than the thunder where principles are at stake’.

Be compassionate, but not at the cost of your own well-being. Go the extra mile, where you feel right making the extra effort. Forgive, but don’t forget. The same mistake twice is a choice.  Why should anyone assume that your person can be taken for granted? Do you really feel happy ‘fitting in’ with people that you are subconsciously aware use you in some way? What kind of lopsided worldview is that? Are you not enough? Is it really a sense of lack of self-worth that allows us to be taken advantage of? Who really needs to change?

Food for thought.