There is a quote that has found its way into many posts on this blog – “Judging a person doesn’t define who they are, it defines who you are.” I still subscribe to that. However, motivated by the daily outrage on social platforms on everything ranging from a Coldplay video to a newspaper calling the city by its old name – Bombay, to each other’s political or religious belief systems, and by the behaviour of people around, (and myself when I introspected) I decided to go further along that quote. The result was this tweet
“Judging a person doesn’t define who they are; it defines who you are.” But how they react to that judgment/label indicates who they are.
— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) March 11, 2016
Quite self explanatory. Just as a judgment defines the person who is judging, how the person who has been judged reacts gives us an idea of him/her.
To borrow from Daniel Gilbert, each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and we use our minds to transcend these boundaries. Our mind creates filters that enable us to see things/others/ourselves in a certain light, one that most likely is not the same as how the rest of the world sees it. As the saying goes, we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. In the context of our own selves, over a period of time, this results in the creation of our self image, a set of labels we have given ourselves. Manu fancies himself quite a bibliophile, and was once ‘offended’ when Flipkart sent him a (mass) mail with the latest Chetan Bhagat book as ‘Handpicked for you”. 😀 When someone passes a judgment on us, and deviates from the ‘script’ – especially in a way that conflicts with our self image – we react. And most of the time, we react as though by being called something/judged in a certain way, we become that. In that reaction is a story we have told ourselves, about us.
My good friend Kavi wrote a wonderful post a few weeks ago, and introduced me to a fantastic quote, attributed to Viktor Frankl
Take the time, and make the space.