Do you think anything results from nothing?

It’s very easy to react to situations without fully comprehending the reasons that led to them. We may sometimes discard reasons and deem them unimportant, but reasons matter. It’s the only thing that truly helps us understand why things are the way they are or why they occurred in the first place. Even if we don’t embark on the search for the meaning behind an action, we can at least try to understand or acknowledge that every circumstance or behavior stems from something.

There’s this almost trite saying: “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” - one thing eventually leads to another, then another, and it goes on in the form of an increasingly protracted string. Everything we do, everything that happens to us, around us, because of us, in spite of us, is a part of a chain of events. I brought this up because I've been pondering about how uncomplicated and natural it is to judge people. Ironically, some of the things we’re judged for, or the things we judge other people for, are things that we’ve done or thought of doing. At times, I see criticism as something that comes when someone sees a mistake they’ve made in the actions of someone else, so correcting them is like correcting themselves because they’ve lived through the consequences of that same mistake.

Today’s message isn’t merely recognizing why we do the things we do, but why others do so too. Sometimes we act because we feel comfortable in doing so: when you’re around people you can see yourself in i.e because they identify with you in a physical, familial, ideological, or cultural sense, it’s fathomable that you would feel safe with them. But I think we should also aim to see and understand what’s out of our comfort zone and the opportunities and benefits that come from that. We may not even try to understand certain things because they’re out of our safety net. If we see only through those lenses, we would miss out on the rest of the picture; there’s an entire world that you ignore when you choose to look only within certain spaces.

Lastly, I find that understanding yourself and the reason(s) behind your actions is one of the most important things you can do. I say this because what you think about yourself is what you will most likely effortlessly and unintentionally project to the world. I think that as we learn more about ourselves, we will begin to understand our behaviors and actions. This would in turn help us understand other people and why they do the things they do.

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Until the next one,

-C