SOMETHING that’s happening in this lockdown, is that family members, whether couples, siblings or parents and children are reacting to faults they are seeing in each other! Lockdown or no lockdown, many of us spend a lot of time scrutinizing other people, searching hard to discover faults in them. It’s like a woman who spent a whole evening with a very handsome man, who had taken her out for dinner, “How was he?” asked a friend.
“He’s got a small scar behind his right ear,” she said, “I saw it when he bent to pick up a spoon!” Can you imagine that’s all she saw! I wonder what flaws the man saw in her, that she didn’t know she had, because she was so busy searching for his fault. They say, the camel never sees its own hump, but that of the camel in front of it, that is always before its eyes. I probably don’t see my own faults very clearly. Or, as a writer once said, “Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people’s characters.”
There’s this story of an elderly couple who, while on an automobile trip, stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch. The woman left her eyeglasses on the table, but didn’t miss them until they were back on the highway. And, of course, it was difficult to turn around by then.
Her husband fumed and complained all the way back to the restaurant about her “Always leaving her glasses” behind.” They finally arrived, and as the woman got out of the car to retrieve her glasses, the old man said, “While you’re in there, you may as well get my hat, too!”
Psychologist Carl Jung says “everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Or, put another way, the humps we can’t help but seeing in others are a lot like the humps others see in us. Or as the Good Book says, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
So, I do believe we need to change our way of thinking. Start looking for the positive in others. Overlook the humps or specks and tell yourself, that though they are irritating they could also be a necessary evil. How’s that you may ask.
Well, the beauty of we human beings is that each one of us is very different from the next, and in the differences may come some faults, but in the differences also come characteristics worthy of being enjoyed. So, start looking for the good in others during this opportunity of the lockdown, rather than the bad. And whatever you do, stop being a camel..!
