What is your favourite colour? Blue, black,
yellow, red, orange, green?… Mine is white. Now imagine, a world in which
everything is the hue of your favourite colour. In my world then, everything
will be white – cars, scooters, buses, roads, footpaths, buildings, trees,
their leaves, fruits and even different types of flowers! And of course, every
person will be dressed in white.
You may replace my favourite colour with
yours…assuming it is red, yellow, green (or god forbid, black. How depressing!)
You get the picture; a single-hued world. Now, even when visualising it, it’s
not very pleasing to one’s senses, is it? I would actually find such a world
boring. And after a few days…nah, a few hours, get tired of white and crave to
see other colours.
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Extending the concept of a single-hued
world to people, we are our own favourite person and believe we are perfect…or
at least always ‘right’. We crave for ‘different’ experiences all the time.
Yet, when it comes to people, we want everyone to be just like ourselves. Most
of our annoyances with others stem from their tendency to think, feel, speak
and behave differently from ourselves. For example, if you are punctilious,
tardy people will annoy you to no end, and a laid-back person won’t appreciated
being pushed to manage her/his time more efficiently.
If you had to live with your own mirror
image (in thought, action and words, not necessarily looks), you’d discover
there are many things about YOU that would annoy you. You’d probably not even
get along with yourself. Imagine, if you are angry all the time, or whining all
the time, or lethargic… so also your
mirror image would remain angry, whiny or slothful.
If all the people in your world were just
like you, you’d feel bored or hurt or resentful after some time. You’d no more
want anyone to think, speak or behave like you. You wouldn’t like your belief
system any more. For instance, all disciplined souls would be so punctilious,
that every party would end by 9 pm and the whole world would be in bed by 10
pm. There’d be no late night movies or eateries to go to. They’d be so focussed
on their to-do list that they wouldn’t ever sit back and smell the coffee.
And all the ‘fun’ people would party into
the wee hours every single night, binge eat and drink, and have neither regular
sleeping nor waking hours. They wouldn’t get much done in terms of work and
remain underachievers.
Each type needs the other to be able to
balance out their lives and help them enjoy it better.
Just as we can’t have a world of only
white, similarly we can’t have a world filled with only one kind of people. We
need people different from us in our environment to help us evolve. The
disciplined ones need the ‘fun’ types to help them let their hair down once in
a while and the ‘fun’ ones need the disciplined types to help them reign in
their excesses.
We need to embrace each others’ differences
because each person, however different, lends colour to our otherwise
monochrome world.
