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Intolerance


“Most people I hate. The rest I tolerate”.   
                                                                                                               – Everybody Loves Raymond

I walked into the kitchen and he was washing his plates at the sink. I nodded a polite Good Morning and waited for him to finish. Feeling something hot behind me, I turned to see the stove turned to the maximum without any dish placed on it. He noticed my annoyance at having seen this, for the second time in a week, and rushed to defend himself.

“Its very cold so I turned it on”.

Not that I am a staunch environmentalist, but his statement just triggered me. Instead of increasing the heater temperature or just wearing a jacket, he took the energy wasting alternative of turning on the kitchen stove to the full to heat up the kitchen. His sheer ignorance irritated me, just like how a month earlier I had caught my neighbor leaving the shared shower turned on while she returned to her room, since there was ‘no hot water’. In both cases, I felt the need to retort and make the ignorant less ignorant.

“If its cold, close the window and increase the heater temperature. You waste a lot of energy when you do this”, I snapped pointing at the stove. He remained silent while I grabbed my stuff and stormed off.

The irony was that I was not paying his bills, so in a sense he had every right to leave it turned on for as long as he wanted. Same went for my neighbor who apologized profusely for leaving the water turned on. However, in both cases, their actions were sufficient for me to blacklist them in my head and unsettle me for some extended minutes. They had not done anything that affected my way of life or disturbed my daily routine, but they had crossed certain principles or ideas that I held dear. Simply because of that, I was quick to jump to conclusions about who they were.

I feel this more and more as I grow older, a growing judgement and intolerance towards anything that I feel goes against my beliefs or affects me directly. If you are not doing what I am doing or want you to be doing, chances are that you are probably ignorant, because you know, ‘I know better’. This attitude of intolerance for something that could differ from what I had in mind, worries me. It had never intensely bothered me this much before and makes me wonder if it is a sign of adulthood, when one becomes increasingly rigid with one’s opinions and beliefs. Consequently, everything starts to be seen as black and white when the world is in fact a million shades of grey (because 50 shades of grey is too mainstream).

The Buddhists and Stoics propose a method of compassion and passive acceptance of the way things are. That does help, for often anger and frustration are the result of having an excessively optimistic expectation of how things will turn out. The key is to temper these expectations. Unfortunately, that requires infinite patience, something that I have in infinitely small amounts. However, with people, you have to be patient and hope they buy into your message. Usually they won’t, but sometimes they do.

After all, did he not turn off the heater when you went back into the kitchen 5 minutes later?


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