Points to Ponder: November 11, 2017

Today we will reflect on the purpose of our relationships. Why are we interested in relationships? If we look around us, some of the categories in which we can classify our relationships are personal, professional, social, and others like the relationship we share by virtue of our nationality, the relationship between a doctor and a patient etc. If we see closely, relationships are a medium of exchange. Every relationship also has more or less well defined terms of exchange. For example, the terms of contract of a parent and child, doctor and patient, teacher and student are all prescribed by our social order. Our expectations of people are in line with this order. And “good relationships” are conventionally defined as the ones that conform to this order. By good relationships we unambiguously mean the ones that fulfill our expectations generated by this unwritten code.

Today, when we deal with human beings, we look at them in the garb of these relationships. For example, my father is my father. He should and must understand and exhibit the attributes of a “normal father”. He is not a unique soul and should not be one. One person’s uniqueness might become another person’s concern as the set of unique qualities of that person and the set of expected qualities of the role in which I see him/her may just be disjoint. However, if we do away with the veil of our expectations and just try to look at souls as unique entities, we would find that each of them is full of a number of beautiful qualities. Sometimes, if we are entirely focusing on what we want, we might just miss out on what we are getting. Let me take some time today to detach from what should be and look at what is. Believe me, its not as bad as I have made it out to be.