True Friendships Involve Respect.

They say that raw intelligence is arrogant. Every once in a while you bump into individuals in your life who you think are a little arrogant and you cut them some slack because you believe that they are also really intelligent. And then as you continue talking to them once in a while the thin thread of tolerance breaks and they cross the line of arrogance. I was borderline close to making a new friend today but the person was fairly interesting but I guess the line of tolerance when it comes to arrogance was crossed.

Honestly it was a perfectly normal argument but this person used words like "Yeah, Right"  about ten times in the conversation and was constantly passing signals of a strange superiority complex. You know signals like rolling of eyes, tapping of hands on the table and other strange signals which tell you that the person is there but not quite really there. It is a strange form of communication where you cannot point your finger on anything in particular but the person is almost telling you directly that you need to give up and surrender to the attacks of insults.

I've always held a sense of pride in saying that I don't usually go ahead and end friendships. What that means is that I'll go out of my way to make a friendship (or for that matter any other form of relationship) work but life has taught me that there is a difference between going an extra mile to make a friendship or a relationship work and losing your self respect to make it work. While the earlier option almost always works the later one almost never does.

Which is why every time I sense contempt in a relationship (be it friendship or just acquaintanceship) I am very scared. I can deal with difference of opinion. I can deal with arguments. I can even deal with fights but show me a person who has lost the basic sense of respect for you and I'll show you a person you should not be friends with. So let this be the first time when I went ahead and stopped discussions with a person who could have come borderline close to being a friend. Because friendship at the price of self respect isn't usually worth it because then you just keep paying and you just keep hoping that some day things might materialize into a meaningful friendship and it almost never does.

Happiness Is A State Of Mind.

I've been working on making happiness a way of life for sometime now. I'm not going to come out and claim that my life has changed dramatically since I started doing that but what I will tell you is that once you do not allow yourself the permission to bitch and cry and moan and whine about problems pretty much the only thing you are left to doing is getting your butt off the couch and working at the problem.

Actively practicing happiness doesn't have anything to do with meditation or those self help programs where they teach to laugh like an idiot even when you are unhappy. Practicing active happiness is just about not allowing yourself to cry or bitch or moan or whine at the first given opportunity. It is a way of life where you tell yourself that you're going to actively work on fixing problems and not whine about them.

Of course you break away from this practice more and more when you start but then as you continue living up with this mindset you get better and better at it. The key here is not to try to master and learn this up as a self help tool which is going to change your life but adapt it as a gradual lifestyle where you learn happiness over a period of time.

All of us live with "IFs" and "Buts" and that is just fine. If I have a really close friend who would speak to me when I most wanted to talk to someone I would fight every battle and win it and I don't do that right now and I am whining right now because I don't have that friend. Yeah. Right. The key with actively practicing happiness is realizing the stupidity in that thought process. Of course having good friends around in the times of trouble helps but not having them around is not the sole reason for your failure. Your whining is in fact probably the primary reason for your failures. If you need constant support from friends and social circles find them and have the balls to approach them to seek help. Don't cry about not having them around.

This of course is just one example of how easy it is for people to bitch and whine about everything and blame external factors for everything, but scientists who have been studying happiness have been recently coming out with studies which basically says that happiness is a state of mind that is within and may not have as much to do with extrinsic factors as we think it does. So here's a little assignment for you today. Stop crying. Just make an active effort at it. Of course you will forget that you are making this effort once in a while and you will start whining but then when you remember just stop and start over. Do this for a few days and you might start seeing the change in your thought process and in your over all way of looking at things.

Let me know how it goes. I would love to hear from you.