I realized I had a choice.
I’ve been reading a lot of self-help books lately to avoid feeling too helpless, and some are helpful and some are hopeless. And some I haven’t been able to categorize; I simply can’t work out if they’re useful or not, or bogus or not.
Anyway, one of these seemed to say, and I need to emphasize my role in interpreting it because this is almost certainly not what it said, that if you set high standards for yourself you are likely to set high standards for others, and be constantly disappointed. So far so plausible. But, consequently, it argued, if you try to be gentle to people then you are apt to get frustrated when people are not gentle to you, and if you try not to annoy people then you will be annoyed when others annoy you. As I distilled this down in mind it seemed that I have a choice: to annoy or to be annoyed, to be brutal or to be brutalized. And I still can’t work out if I accept that assessment of the world.
Oddly enough, I was talking to a colleague after work about this very issue of gentleness/annoyance yesterday [from her side originally, but we are very similar so it moved to issues from my end...]
Life is darn tough. On self-help books, I took what I wanted and left what I didn’t: but, as you wrote, there were many areas I just didn’t know what to make of — and tended to put the books back never to be considered again. God bless: my continued prayers.
ok, this one has been stumping/intriguing me because i know i have a comment about something there, and i’ve been trying to figure it out, but i’m not exactly sure what.
perhaps i’m just hearkening back to my own wrestling matches with self help books, and probably have some kind of opinion on it, but doubt it would be appriciated by anybody.
incidentally did you mean ‘have a choice to annoy [i.e. preemptive strike] or else be annoyed if you don’t (etc.)’ or did you mean ‘have a choice to annoy and have a choice to be annoyed (etc.)’ ? nevermind. i’ll leave my creative grammatical interpretations at the door.
didn’t bridget jones eventually burn all of her self help books?
No, I really did mean what I wrote – it’s an either/or thing: either you annoy or you will be annoyed.
ok. i hesitate to reply, but personally i’ve never found that to work. i doubt a preemptive strike ever really prevents it from coming back at you.
I tend to agree with you there, but I realize what I wrote is misleading, cos I’m not talking about preemptive strikes as such. The idea (which I still don’t know if I accept) is more a question of choosing your standards; that if I choose to try not to annoy people then inevitably people will annoy me, so the alternative is to lower my standards so that people don’t annoy me, but accept that the consequence of this is that I will annoy more people. And, unfortunately, that, in turn, brings the risk of rejection, and you know how I feel about rejection.
ok. thanks for the clarification. hmm, standards. yes, i see where you’re coming from. don’t know if i accept it either.