never presume

I hold fast to the belief that if life starts pinging you with pebbles, and you don’t listen, it will start chucking bricks. If you still don’t listen, it will probably end up dropping a whole mountain on you.

I also believe that things recur in our lives to teach us a lesson – and that they will not stop recurring until the lesson is learned. Want to change things for the better in your life? Listen to the lessons.

A recurring theme for me of late has been this one: never presume. Lately I've been met with some heavy presuming or suffered under my own inclination to presume.

Presumption doesn’t just extend to family and close friends… it could even extend to the shirty checkout chick or the crabby postman who jams a ‘please don’t bend’ envelope into your mail box.

Substandard behaviour is substandard behaviour – but sometimes I wonder if it would be wise to stand back and observe that behaviour. . . and not necessarily read into it or judge it or – worst of all – dissect it with a team of gossip-ravaged people, whence upon it rolls and gathers a rather ugly (and most often false) life of its own.

Ugly talk like this (as we all know) can really injure a person.

Here’s a fact: We can never know what is happening in the lives (let alone heads) of anyone else, even our closest family members. We can’t possibly know what physical, mental, emotional or circumstantial issues or events are shaping their lives, affecting their lives, contributing to their behaviour.

Babies and young children so beautifully express their distress, their problems, their ‘issues’ in the simplest of ways – crying, eye-rubbing, needing to be physically close. As we grow and as the tapestry of life wends us from pillar to post, we develop ways of being and coping – mechanisms, reactions, anxieties, whatever – that complicate the natural way we respond to life’s challenges.

We become harder to read. We self-protect. We react and deal with things in ways other people may not understand. Sometimes we’re rude, secretive, chronically passive-aggressive, negative or manipulative. Sometimes we just want to hide from the world.

It’s not fun to deal with inexplicable or aggressive [particularly that most abhorrent passive-aggressive] behaviour, but I’m currently learning that odd behaviour doesn’t necessarily the person make. Being spoken to rudely or having my actions misrepresented by others doesn’t define me . . . and so should not affect me.

Alas, it does affect me, and I’m really striving to change that. I’m so striving to not give a shit. The older I get the more I realise that life isn’t so much about what happens to us as it is about how we handle and respond to it all.

Have you been doing some presuming?