Thursday, December 30, 2010

Why do we don’t step into others shoes?

Every person in life has his own perspective on everything.  Be it the way one should arch his tooth brush in the morning to clean his teeth perfectly or the way one should hold the steering wheel steady while driving on a freezing night when the car heater is not working, the ability to have an opinion on how such things should be done is self inherited by each one of us since birth. The problem occurs when such opinions become so strong that we start advising others on the way it should be done – there by advocating our own opinion. The lines get blurred between offering unsolicited advice and showing genuine concern, which at times is misinterpreted by the receiver, thereby leaving both sides – the adviser and the advised nursing unwanted bruises after a battery of arguments. But had we stepped into the shoes of the other person, we may perhaps be able to look more pragmatically at our own free sermons that we offer to this world, which then can fall like a pack of cards, leaving us surprised.

In life’s journey where an average human spends 80 years per human life on planet earth, we come at intersections, crossroads where there are situations when we are tempted to offer unsolicited advises / opinions to other person. In a lot of these situations though we may not have practically sounded these advises internally in our self talks,  we still go ahead and blurt out the uncooked advise with the bubbling enthusiasm of an adolescent kid.  Even if we are able to experience 10-15 occasions per year of our life where we commit ourselves to put ourselves in others shoes before sermonizing unsolicited opinion / advise, we can be rest assured that they would create lesser mental bruises amongst ourselves and our beloved companions on earth. This would also ensure that our message/ sermon is now more practical and massaged well so that the receiving end embraces it openly, thereby creating a win-win for both the adviser and the receiver.

This ability to step into others shoes will not only help us to remove stink from our own shoes, but also spread new fragrance to others shoes, which will be pollinated elsewhere, thereby bringing in greater peace, tranquility, tolerance and creating a new circle of loved ones around us. This will intangibly be inherited by the rest of fellow humans in the chain and increase peace in relationships on earth.

2 comments:

Meenakshi Deepak said...

quite an introspective article!!

Atreya rocks said...

@ Wifey - :P