Читать книгу Be Happy, Always - Xandria Ooi - Страница 21

Part 1

Perspective

Is life difficult? Or is it that the people in our lives make life difficult? The answer is almost always the latter, until we realize that this is not true either—it is our expectations of how people should be that make our lives difficult.

We all have our values, beliefs, principles, and ethics that we hold true, and they form the standards that guide our lives. We all think that our standards are good; that’s why we subscribe to them. This is why it’s easy to fall into thinking that our own standards are the universal standard—“Kind people will behave this way,” or “Generous people will do that.”

This is when we impose our definitions of what is “good” on people without realizing that we are projecting our expectations upon them. When people—strangers, colleagues, friends, and especially family—behave in ways that are different from our standards, we get upset because we genuinely don’t see why they wouldn’t embrace something that makes so much sense (to us).

However, we forget that what makes sense to one person may not make sense to another person. When we think that someone “has no common sense,” we usually get frustrated at the person. However, how can a different person with a different background and a different personality have the exact same “normal” as we do? Common sense is not common precisely because what is common to me may not be common to you. To expect otherwise is to cause our own suffering.

The guiding principles we believe in drive how we conduct our lives, how we treat others, how professional we are at work, and how we love; and we tend to hold others to the same benchmarks. This is why it’s very instinctive for us to think, “If you love me, you would know this” or “Geez, if I were him, I wouldn’t have done that!” because we always compare others to what we ourselves would or wouldn’t do.

So much of our misery and suffering comes from how we insist the world should be. If you think about it, we only get upset at someone who is behaving in a way that we wouldn’t behave. “He’s so unkind!” (I am a kind person.) “How could she have done that?!” (I would have the sense not to do that.)

Yet if you ask yourself about whether it’s logical to expect people to do what you would do, to think the way you would think, and to behave as you would behave…you’d see that there is little possibility that over seven billion people in this world can be like you; which means that it is even more illogical to get upset when we meet people who are not like us.