Positivity by Abstinence

It's been a while since I've posted in this forum, mostly because of some major changes going on in my life at the moment, and partially because I'm satisfying my blogging-itch by writing on a new blog (Blue Cranes Among Cherry Blossoms) which is related to some of these changes.

Anyway, the point of this blog is to sow the seeds of positive ideological change, and today I feel I have something constructive to share:

I think that sometimes the idea of charity can seem very daunting to people whose lives are spent trying to make ends meet. How can they give, when they can neither afford to spare money, nor time.

I'll give you a clue, how does a business increase it's profit margins? The answer is simple and 2 dimensional: Firstly the company can increase it's prices; in doing this, the profits will automatically be higher (although then you run some risks that are not really related to my illustration). Secondly the company can decrease it's costs.

So what I'm getting at is that our day-to-day experience is affected by others in two similarly obvious ways:

A positive change can be something as complicated as the contribution of a person who has dedicated their lives to teaching the underprivileged in the hope of helping them achieve their dreams, or it could be as simple as a sincere smile from a stranger, laughing at your own silliness, or talking and really listening to someone.

A negative change, on the other hand, can be sometime as overt as witnessing or being a participant in violence, but there are many other more subtle ways of spewing venom into society. Tell me whether any of these sound like something you've seen or done:

• Demonstrating anger at a shop attendant who is unable to satisfy  a customer, not out of negligence or incompetence, but because they do not have the authority to satisfy the customer's need.
• Hooting at someone for being a bad driver. While the hooter is great when attention needs to be drawn quickly, it was never intended as a sonic weapon of mass destruction. Hearing someone making a point that their fellow driver did something wrong at 5am by letting out a long drawn out honk, is really not fun when you're living and trying to sleep in the city. Similarly hanging on your hooter until someone moves at an impasse does little to make them move faster, yet it irritates the everyone around them, leaving everyone feeling worse off.
• Being apathetic, knowing that your actions could improve someone else's lot with no real cost to yourself, but not doing it out of apathy, laziness or as a demonstration of power.
• Shouting, swearing or cursing someone when they've made a mistake (because I think we need to be honest and admit that most times when people makes a mistake, it's not because they are trying to be a malevolent force in the universe.)
• Gossiping. At the risk of being called dogmatic, all gossiping is bad. Really. Gossiping is so destructive, and people don't even realise it. Today in my life, someone divulged that someone they named was sexually active and criticized them for trying to be a responsible person by seeing a medical professional. This dishonours the person while tainting the audience's perception of that person. So here there are two immediate negative effects with zero positive effects, and the audience is probably not going to mention it to the person being gossiped about because it would shame the gossiper and the gossipee, thereby robbing the gossipee of any opportunity to defend himself.
• For guys, whistling, or even simply looking at a woman in a way that causes her to feel unsafe.

None of these things are really acceptable, as in all cases the harmony of society is diminished, with little to no positive effect.

So my message for today is so simple. If you want to change the world for the better, then the easiest, easiest way to do it is to try to decrease the negative impact you have on society.

It's like decreasing your carbon footprint. Few people are actively trying to reverse the accumulation of carbon dioxide by planting trees to break down the molecule, but many people are trying to decrease the negative impact they're having on the ozone by producing less carbon.

Sometimes to be more positive, all you have to do is be less negative.

This week in the car, I allowed someone to cut in front of me. Yes, they were in the wrong lane, but there's a good change they didn't know it at the time. My patience allowed them to correct their mistake without having to manage the manoeuvre while also trying to outwit my attempts to block access to my lane. This meant that they could change into the correct lane safely. In addition to this, if I had gotten upset and gesticulated threateningly, then both of us would have been in worse emotional states.

I also felt a sense of pride at having been so mature, and felt a lot better than I would have had I allowed myself to let out my inner Hulk.

Try it today. And maybe tomorrow. And maybe the day after that. And maybe...