Do you care?

Do you care?

Can’t answer this question naa? Ok, let me rephrase it in sub questions.
Do you care about others?
Do you care about others’ opinions?
Do you care about others’ opinions about you?

First one is the simplest of them; and answer to it is straight forward. We do care about others. Caring about others is one of the inherent tendencies in normal human beings. We live in a society and our support system is tightly woven around it. We care about others to make this society a better place to be in. Our lives are dependent on many other living or nonliving matters and thus by our natural survival instincts we care about all of them. Sometimes you will feel this is our selfish nature, at others you will find it natural.

Second question is bit trickier than the first one. Caring about others’ opinions is not something that comes natural to us. It becomes more difficult when their opinions contradict, or at the least does not match, with ours. Differences are inherent among two human beings. Opinions are something that depends on many things. What kind of environment did we grow up in, what is our present state of mind is like, what we read, what we talk about, what is our circle of influence like, what our past and present friends were like, so on and so forth. Anything, no matter how it is attached to us, or sometimes even if it is not attached, can have some influence on our way of thinking. To add to it, is our own perception of things. Then end result of all these being that each individual may have his own opinions which may be very different from others.

Only people who have the strength to accept the fact that people do have different opinions can care about others opinions. Caring can sometime mean respect while at others just simple ignoring. If you don’t go on fighting with others about their opinions on some topic, then you respect others opinions. In no terms, caring for others opinions just means to agree with them. You might or might now agree with others, and this is a different case altogether.


Third question is where all of us make mistakes. It’s really difficult not to remain fazed by someone else’s opinions about you. When they praise you, you feel proud and content. If they say something derogatory you feel hurt. These are two extremes. In the middle lies the situation where their opinions can not affect your life in any means. Something like how they think about you, or how do they rate your ideas, or do they approve your actions.

If you clear in your mind, all these things really do not matter anyways. But we have this bad habit of simply getting bog down by these. Before taking any action, we think a hundred times about what others will think. Most of the times others don’t even bother about our actions, but we would have woven a full plot about things to come. Most of our energy thus wastes in efforts to control our actions and thoughts, so that no one else has wrong or different opinions about us. Karma takes second priority there.

There is another twist to this. We all try to pretend to be unaffected by others opinions. Again this is another natural habit. This has more to do with our satisfaction, that we at least pretended to be unaffected by others, we do have a strong character. But in the inside we burn all our energy to care about their opinions. It’s just a feel good thing, not the reality. There are some people, whose opinions matters a lot to us, and we try to keep them satisfied every time. This is where we don’t remain what we are and try to be what others want us to be. Again the end result is weakness of our character.


The best situation would be the one where, without bothering about someone else’s opinions, we can stick to our opinions. If we can justify our opinions to ourselves, then we have achieved the ultimate knowledge. That day, we get the strongest of character.

********************************
What is Nirvana? "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep."