Today I was accused of being indifferent. Is that true? Perhaps yes. Then why am I troubled? The way it was taken perhaps was not right.
Indifference could be absolute and then it could be relative. It depends largely upon your priorities and what phase of mind are you in. If you happen to be working on a project of your interest (say X) and another important yet not a priority thing (say Y) comes up, what do you do? Of course you end up attending to that Y thing for a while to see if that is not of utmost importance and can wait and then revert to the X thing. Let me not take things of heart and mind so statistically. However, even though your indifference may be relative to some other issue of utmost importance yet people may misunderstand that to be absolute and directed to them in pure terms. That pains.
Even the priorities that we have are not absolute and keep on changing from time to time, some even during the time of one single day. For example what do you do when you are sleepy? Do you go to bed irrespective of the time of the day and the place and position you are in? No you don't, you don't go and sleep anytime of the day you feel the need to be, or else I would never be able to attend any class! Yet you sleep every single day even though you choose not to indulge several times in a day. Do you feel guilty when you don't sleep during the day? Do you not at times consider feeling sleepy a nuisance and yet yearn to feel the opposite at night? When even such carnal urges like sleep are modulated just within the matter of one day, why is it that our other priorities can not change from one moment to the other- perhaps not as drastically as you do in the case of sleep but yet they do wavier.
People would argue that things like sleep cannot be equated with people, especially people who matter a lot to you! Yes and no. Let me first elaborate why no. What sleep is to a person is what we call a carnal urge psychologically- it is a feeling. When you talk to a person, interact with him/her you end up experiencing emotions produced by and directed to your self. When you yearn to talk to a person, you want to do so cause you feel good while talking to him/her and on the contrary an irritating person is not irritating himself/herself but because you perceive that person to be. You think you connect to a person because the same stimulus stirs up similar emotion in both of you, yet it is again what you perceive that it is similar in both cases. In a nutshell, interacting with a person doesn't mean anything else but going through loads of emotions that are not perceived by any one else but you. Therefore, it is not necessary that since you feel good talking to a person at a certain given point of time, you will always continue to do that all given points of time. Even the law of normality has in its inception incorporated a distribution and not a single value- both on the positive and negative side of the mean and includes in itself outliers.
Indifference could be absolute and then it could be relative. It depends largely upon your priorities and what phase of mind are you in. If you happen to be working on a project of your interest (say X) and another important yet not a priority thing (say Y) comes up, what do you do? Of course you end up attending to that Y thing for a while to see if that is not of utmost importance and can wait and then revert to the X thing. Let me not take things of heart and mind so statistically. However, even though your indifference may be relative to some other issue of utmost importance yet people may misunderstand that to be absolute and directed to them in pure terms. That pains.
Even the priorities that we have are not absolute and keep on changing from time to time, some even during the time of one single day. For example what do you do when you are sleepy? Do you go to bed irrespective of the time of the day and the place and position you are in? No you don't, you don't go and sleep anytime of the day you feel the need to be, or else I would never be able to attend any class! Yet you sleep every single day even though you choose not to indulge several times in a day. Do you feel guilty when you don't sleep during the day? Do you not at times consider feeling sleepy a nuisance and yet yearn to feel the opposite at night? When even such carnal urges like sleep are modulated just within the matter of one day, why is it that our other priorities can not change from one moment to the other- perhaps not as drastically as you do in the case of sleep but yet they do wavier.
People would argue that things like sleep cannot be equated with people, especially people who matter a lot to you! Yes and no. Let me first elaborate why no. What sleep is to a person is what we call a carnal urge psychologically- it is a feeling. When you talk to a person, interact with him/her you end up experiencing emotions produced by and directed to your self. When you yearn to talk to a person, you want to do so cause you feel good while talking to him/her and on the contrary an irritating person is not irritating himself/herself but because you perceive that person to be. You think you connect to a person because the same stimulus stirs up similar emotion in both of you, yet it is again what you perceive that it is similar in both cases. In a nutshell, interacting with a person doesn't mean anything else but going through loads of emotions that are not perceived by any one else but you. Therefore, it is not necessary that since you feel good talking to a person at a certain given point of time, you will always continue to do that all given points of time. Even the law of normality has in its inception incorporated a distribution and not a single value- both on the positive and negative side of the mean and includes in itself outliers.
Nevertheless, we can not just say whatever I have said above and move on. Undeniable that priorities can waiver, yet people can not live that way. Consider that you may take for granted that whenever you call a certain person, he or she is willing to take up the call and would talk in a ebullient tone with you yet that person may feel totally different on all occasions that you do call him and also conveys you his pleasure and displeasure at each moment. Where will you stand? Would you be able to call that person or not?
Not I will presume. Why? Cause that is what being human is all about. That is what we do as we age. Remember the times in 1st or 2nd grade when you could be angry with a friend and would call him names at one moment and yet the other moment you would make up with him and start playing along. Those where times when we acted at the spur of the moment. However, you can not repeat anything like this with any of your friends today. As we age we train our mind to sustain an emotion or feeling for a longer time, we try to associate things, situations and people with a certain feeling and that is what determines our priorities. As we age we try and make this a consistent habit. Yet we are still learning and are bound to err, its human. We may want to act as a mature person and say that my priorities in life are more less decided or at least they don't waiver with every spur of the moment decision I make, yet once in a while you may act spontaneously leaving the other person believe that your indifference is absolute even though it was relative to the issue at hand.
