JC's post of the Desiderata brought me back to another gem I've been holding on to for years. I annually talk about this with my daughters, and like to think the lesson of self-respect sank in at an early age.
Do You Act – Or React?I walked with my friend, a Quaker, to the newsstand the other night, and he bought a paper, thanking the newsy politely. The newsy didn’t even acknowledge it.
“A sullen fellow, isn’t he?” I commented.
“Oh, he’s that way every night,” shrugged my friend.
“Then why did you continue to be so polite to him?”
“Why not?” inquired my friend. “Why should I let him decide how I’m going to act?”
As I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that the important word was “act”. My friend acts toward people; most of us react toward them.
He has a sense of inner balance that is lacking in most of us. He knows who he is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility for incivility, because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct.
When we are enjoined in the Bible to return good for evil, we look upon this as a moral injunction – which it is. But, it is also a psychological prescription for our emotional health.
Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His spiritual temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements.
Praise gives him a feeling of euphoria, which is false because it does not last and it does not come from self-approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own secretly shaky opinion of himself. Snubs hurt him and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness. A serenity of spirit cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another determine whether we be rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over our own personalities, which is ultimately all we possess.
- Author Unknown
