The Thin Line.....

Emotions like everything else in life are a part of a continuum. They do not appear in discrete packets. There is an intermediary stage before irritation turns to anger, a smile turns into a laughter, between pulling someones leg and being mean and when assertiveness becomes stubborness. Most if I may add are from the perspective of the watcher than the do-ee (I picked this from Everybody Loves Raymond)

So the question now is whether there's a thin line separating these stages, how many degrees separate these stages and who owns the line? My guess is its most always the watcher.

Brings me back to the fact that everything that we say or do today is driven by perceptions (good or bad, right or wrong). Though we've made great advances in Communication Technology what has taken a beating is the Inter-personal communication. We are too shy or too proud to go ask people what they think about what we are doing, have done or plan to do. Resultantly, we assume a reaction of a certain kind and go ahead with whatever we wanted to do..."I ate the entire chocolate because I thought you did not want it" or "We went and watched the play..didn't think you'd be interested" There are ofcourse zillion such examples.

Coming back to the thin line.... Is there a way to set the bar? Can we actually define words like anger and come to one common understanding on what it means and when it actually sets in?? If we actually did, I bet we'd wipe out the entire man-woman poking around gig. On second thoughts, life then wouldn't be too much fun either.

Guess the only way to get around this is, that as an individual, much like an umpire in cricket we have to display consistency in our interpretation of the rule and call that delivery a wide or a no-ball at exactly the same point everytime and regardless of who. And as the saying goes in cricket "The line belongs to the umpire!"

Closure...Putting 2 and 2 2gether

What’s with the human mind? Why are our minds constantly in this great hurry to jump to conclusions? Any inputs from any of our senses seems to trigger the absorb, process, analyze and deduce sequence.

You see two colleagues of opposite sex sitting together and having lunch…bang they must be going around. A colleague walks away to take a call on hand-phone…you go it must be his wife or at other times must be a placement consultant! Cricketers are not faring well… Oh! Those guys spend more time shooting for commercials than in the nets! There are numerous such examples of people doing such things (would have done it ourselves). Well! Lets face it we are judgemental.

We give no room for things to have happened as a coincidence or out of force of habit. For many of us there HAS to be a reason behind every event and occurrence. Therefore the need to create, maintain/change and manage perceptions. Then starts the battle between one’s self-image and perceived image. For many of us perception is reality.

We are a species that takes its place in the evolution chain to seriously. But why take our analytical capabilities so far?

I do not want to know why it smells great after a drizzle nor do I want to find the reason behind why a sunset or a sunrise look best from the beach. I just want live in and enjoy the moment!