Self-Awareness: Ask Yourself

I’ve been observing people, including close friends and family, for a while now. There are so many patterns when it comes to deep rooted issues and hardly anyone that I know talks about it. Perhaps I’m the first one out of my group and inner/outer circle to really figure it out? Or, maybe I’m assuming far more than I could ever imagine… But that’s the whole point of philosophy, right?

My entire point is there’s a short answer for pretty much everything. Depending on perception and intuition, something someone says can impact another a great deal if spoken with a tone or attitude. If you look at a work-life situation where someone is going to their superior for an answer on a project or even on just what they think they should do in a general task, the employer’s answer is everything. If they involve compassion, they automatically become a leader; if they involve anger, they become a corporate dictator.

Unfortunately, now, each new generation is missing a key component (some things will always be missed): whether people are taught how to account for themselves, or if they use anger over reason. As a human race, we forget how to teach people simple emotional remedies. Emotions, and how to control them, are a part of so many problems today; communication, how to express ourselves with confidence so almost everyone can understand. Some people completely shut themselves down and don’t express emotion or sensitivities at all, while others are too comfortable expressing their inner thoughts. Then what’s our answer that our jobs, university professors, and peers tell us? We slap a disorder on it and let people continue to think that there is no way to help them, because they don’t respond to one or two approaches. Basically, we give up on one another. As humans, in a fast-moving and developing society, we lack the knowledge on how to teach compassion or patience.

“You can’t learn it from school, you’re born with it!”

When the reality is that we aren’t born with it at all. We learn compassion, patience, and how to influence from the very first fundamentals we are given, our parents; but why does it have to stop there? Why can’t our teachers who are paid so little (when they are the ones shaping us and supporting us through childhood to adolescents) become the ones to teach us the core values that strengthen our households and communities?

Children give parents a new outlook, and if those parents are even in the slightest way invested in their children, they can apply anything they learn to themselves and others around them. We have worked very well in hardships around the world, but yet the west remains so closed off to one another and refuses to recognize the signs that we need help with personal development.

On social media, all I tend to see are posts about independence and progression that are so vague it can paint the wrong picture for anyone, age aside. I see quotes saying, "Sometimes you have to be selfish', or quotes saying, "You have to put yourself first no matter what", subconsciously telling people, don’t help anyone but yourself and do not ever work as a team. Whether you take it that way or not, a lot of people do. Sometimes people can get in habits of taking advice too literal. What all those comments really need, are better words.

"Sometimes you have to tell your peers you need to take time away to recharge."

"Remember to focus on what makes you happy, keeping in mind that your choices can deeply affect others."

Words have such a strong influence, but we’ve turned North America into a nation of war. Not because of the rest of the world, but because we’ve built our own walls to our ears and hearts. Maybe I’m just a hippie at heart that believes we should just be kind to each other, but what does that even mean? How can we? When are we supposed to? We don’t get a rule book telling us how these feelings work in our bodies and how to not take things so personally.

Maybe I’m supposed to write it? Not everyone will agree, but could they?