Self-centred

Wrote this yesterday but did the falling asleep on the sofa til 4am trick last night so only just got to post it now...writing going swimmingly this week. The short story is finished in the first draft and reduced to the requisite number of words in the second. I'm letting it lie for a few days/weeks before I go back for the third go. I've written 7,500 words of the book over the last 2 days. I am in the groove, on a roll and in the zone all at the same time!
Oh and the swimming is also going swimmingly - how else could it go? And the rest of the fitness/triathlon training...if only I could get the food and weight part of it back on track...


My thoughts today turn to the issue of self-centredness. Maybe it's not wholly new as the point yesterday re paying taxes is a little of the same.


(By the way, welcome back Dr JMcC! Long time no see...I have been avoiding Cambridge since that night out with Dr Booth, but still get a shudder when I hear a Polish accent.)


So, today on the JV show, there's a lady on complaining that lots of people cut up the funeral cortege when she was burying her father. Most of the comments were on the lines of how disrespectful we have become as a society. Now, firstly, this is undoubtedly true. I am sure that the vast majority of the 'bad' drivers that the lady observed were simply so wrapped up in their own lives, their own deadlines and their own little world, that to pay a thought for someone else's grief didn't come into question. The precious few seconds they lost because of a slow cortege were just too important to them. Self-centred.


However, I took something else interesting out of the discussion too. Not once did the lady concerned mention the possibility that one or two of these drivers may have had a legitimate reason for being in a hurry. A reason would be legitimate in this sense only if the overall social view of the circumstances were known and an assessment could be made that their need to hurry was indeed greater than the lady's need for 'respect' to be shown during her father's funeral. I'm not saying that the chances of this are very high. They are probably very small indeed. But what if someone had just heard that THEIR father had just had an accident and they were rushing to be with him. Wouldn't the still living father take precedence over the already dead father? And what if the accident or illness were a child instead? I'm sure there are many other situations we could imagine, all of them rare but still possible. People buy lottery tickets with only a 1 in 14 million chance of winning because it is just about possible. Why then is it so difficult to imagine a calamitous event with probablilities of say 1 in a million, happening to someone else?


My point is not that this was the case in the lady's funeral situation. My point is that it didn't even seem to cross her mind that it might, just might, be the case. She was, quite understandably, wrapped up in her life, her deadline, her little world.


I recall that one of the signs of emotional intelligence that Daniel Goleman refers to in his book is the ability to assume that those who cross you, and he uses the roads as a specific example, have a legitimate reason for doing so. It is emotionally intelligent to let it go, to think the best of others, to assume there might be a legitimate reason for someone else's 'bad' behaviour.


So no matter how justifiably self-centred we could be, surely it's better to forgive and not judge.