FEELINGS AND SENSITIVITY

Hello everybody, I hope you're feeling fine? Hello everybody, I hope you're feeling, feeling feeling, I hope you're feeling fine😉?

Welcome to today's gist, which would actually be a jumble of my very random thoughts. 

I want to talk about respect for people's reactions to life's experiences. I've sort of talked about this in a previous post (go check my post titled "Ephemeral") but something happened recently that has made me decide to bring this up again. If there's one thing I've learned, it is that no one has the right to decide how someone else reacts to situations, good or bad, and it is audacious as well as disrespectful to presume to do so; the fact that you would have a different "more mature" reaction to a situation gives you absolutely no right to tell another person how to behave in the exact situation. We are all different and we all have different ways of processing and responding to situations and we should each be allowed to do that at our pace. My opinion has always been that if you do not have anything helpful to say to a person in pain, just shut up! You mustn't speak, it will be better to have said nothing than to hurt someone with what you say. Something that readily comes to mind in that regard is the story of Job's friends: for seven days after they came to see Job in his predicament, they kept quiet and everyone could assume they were mourning Job's predicament with him; every time I read the portion when they began to speak after staying with him silently, I wish they had just gone home immediately after the 7 days because what they were saying... such wicked and inhumane things that he especially didn't need to hear. 

This goes beyond grief, some people may come into good fortune and may not have the "ecstatic" reaction you would expect them to have over their good news; rather than beginning to show us that you are the one in charge of the gratitude register by telling them how ungrateful they are because they do not have the reaction you would expect, "drink water and mind your business". I'm not saying also that if someone is behaving out-of-line, they shouldn't be brought to task but abeg, we must let people live their lives and make sure when we say we are helping, we are truly helping. Last last, in all your gettings, get sensitivity abeg. 

Till we meet next week!

Love,

Achenyo.