How I lost friends by refusing to talk behind their backs ?
And you could too..
I have been on this spiritual journey for the last couple of years and one of the realisations I had was my bad habit of talking about people behind their backs.
This made me remember a time when I was at school in which it had led to an unpleasant experience, which could have been avoided by my resisting the urge to talk about others.
I also came to the understanding that talking about other people tells more about the person I am rather than the person I was talking about.
Armed with this understanding along with all all the self-help books I had been reading I came to the following conclusions:
Firstly, If I was talking about someone else, highly likely they were talking about me too. It hurt and I felt wounded and I realised they would too if they found out.
Secondly, I realised it was because I felt inferior in that given situation or from the person concerned.This was much harder to accept. It was also because the person was more successful, richer, prettier, popular, adventurous or did not have the same approach in life as I did and the list goes on. It was easier to pull someone down rather than rise up and face my own inadequacies.
Thirdly, I wanted to have richer and more meaningful conversations which lifted me up rather than the guilt feeling you get afterwards similar to eating fast food.I realised when I was constantly talking about others it kept me away from having the real conversations which have the potential to change my life’s direction.These conversations needed more courage from my side along with more self-awareness.
When I was going through this inner realisation, I remembered a story from my childhood in which Tenali Rama, a wise person in the village is asked to differentiate between three identical looking dolls.
He concurs that one doll is good, one average and one bad. The people are perplexed and ask him to explain how did he come to that conclusion.He demonstrates this by putting a string inside the ear of the first doll. The string comes out from the doll’s mouth, he says this is the bad doll as it represents people who talk about everything they hear. For the second doll, he puts the string in its ears and the string comes out of the other ear and for this doll he says is the average doll as whatever is heard from the ear goes straight out of the other ear. For the last doll the string does not come out at all and goes straight to it’s stomach. He says that this is the good doll which represents people who will listen to you and will keep your secret.
Around the same time as my inner turmoil, I renewed my passion for books and read about issues which concerned me.I realised the time which would have been spent thinking and gossiping about others was more going towards constructive thoughts about how to reduce my carbon footprint, writing articles like this one, gardening and having meaningful conversations with people I like.
I have lost friends in the process as I didn’t have anything else left to talk to some of them. As a consequence, I have fewer number of people who want to interact with me and vice versa and it’s OK.
The path I have chosen is not the path of least resistant but it makes me happy, it doesn't hurt anyone and it aligns with the values in my life and that to me is enough.
