Life is all Relationship and Relationships are all Habits
A lot keeps happening when you are at the helm of an unpredictable, adventurous, adrenaline-rich voyage of bringing a new product to life and showing it to the world. The luxury of introspection is a saviour that people often forget to relish and enjoy, including me, but not on this Sunday.
I have often been a not so good judge of individuals, said that I have been lucky to be blessed to be in the company of rare-gems who have stood firm at times of need, with their wisdom, advice, resource, and support, net-net which kind of balances.
Picking whom to work with and whom to avoid is a knack, and if mastered, like any other skill, will make life a joyous ride.
It started with a twitter-thread(attached towards end) where I wanted to consolidate the filtering criteria, and I did that, to the best of my own abilities.
But there was something which felt incomplete, what was missing, I don’t know. Maybe there is no formula, it is an art and a science, digging a little deeper I feel the meta aspect is “relationship”. The kind of chemistry and balance, that we as individuals strike with others.
All of our life is relationships — with self, with friends, with the workplace, with our home, with surroundings, with family, with concepts. You are having a relationship with this article as you read, and me as I write.
Relationships without, are a reflection of relationship within.
Sigmund Freud in his work on Psychosexual development mentions that most of the development in an individual occurs during the phallic stage
(three to five years of age). The relationships we have with ourselves is highly influenced by the relationships we had with the adults during the phallic stage. The way adults reacted to us then, is the way we react toward ourselves now, both positively and negatively.
Put together, the above means, our relationship with everyone, the way we treat others, is how we were treated as a child. It is for this reason that we see some individuals having a flourishing relationship with all, while others tend to struggle with most. Barring a few exceptions, there is an evident trend which can perfectly be spotted.
Keeping psychology aside, let us allow common-sense to take the centre-stage.
It leads us to a question - Will our life be limited to how we were treated in those initial years? What about the ability to work one’s way out of problems? What about one’s own will to change himself?
The cases are many, Abraham Lincoln once got into a sword duel just because he had a bad habit of intensely voicing his disagreements with ruthless satire and wicked quips. (Mentalfloss has an article on it. [2]) The habit almost cost him his life, and later he made a habit of not sending any sort of abuse to anyone.
The movie Gifted Hands talks about how Ben Carson as a violent child came close to murder. His life switched to a different trajectory making him an ace surgeon and a politician that once was a leading Republican contender. He summarises three things that brought about the change
1. A long, solitary session in a bathroom where he really connected with Jesus.
2. An early decision to dedicate no time to think about how the country has failed or mistreated black people for centuries.
3. Very, very hard work.
This tells us, even our relationships are habits and patterns, and if we work upon them we can change our lives.
To simplify, everything we have around us is a function of our habit.
Gandhi’s two famous quotes come to mind :
1. You must be the change you want to see in the world.
2. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.
As an idealistic teen after graduation, I used to work with a desire to change the world, in a rather big way, over the last 10 years as the meandering routes that life has taken me through, I have realised, the easiest I can do to change the world is to change self, and the hardest of all things I can do is to change myself.
Changing myself, getting better relationships, having a more peaceful and fulfilling life is about building better habits. While having those 11 criteria which I listed in the twitter thread, does serve some cognizance, having a better relationship with one and all is yet another habit. A habit which will take it’s own due course.
I have been reading quite a bit on habits, next article might be a summary of the readings.
[1] — https://twitter.com/5aket/status/1127528907626803201
[2] — http://mentalfloss.com/article/12382/time-abraham-lincoln-and-political-rival-almost-dueled-island