There is always a thin line between everything. Do we all face it in life ? I.e The thin line between right and wrong… The line between a friend and an enemy… The thin line between love and hate…

I guess I did face it in different stages of my life. So lemme recall some situations I faced and what did I choose to do…

— Love vs Hate —

There are many scientific reasons for both love and hate and there are people who do research by doing brain mapping and measuring the reactions towards the feeling of Love or Hate. But don’t be scared I’m definitely not going to talk scientifically :P as I’m not qualified enough to do it. So lets talk about my take on it ….

In one stage of my life I was pushed to the extreme and all I had was two options and there was just a thin line between both. In the year 2004 I
lost two important people in my life at almost the same time and it impacted me very very much, but I need to thank one best childhood friend of mine Ravi who was there for me day and night and made sure I was never alone. At that stage I did a lot of retrospection on what and why am I the only one in this world to be punished like this ? And later I realized that it is me who has to decide weather I hate this life and continue to hate the people in it for this whole life ? Or Love this life and love everything and everyone in it ?…. Thankfully I did choose to love life and the people in it and guess what I don’t think I have ever regretted this decision because I have never hurt anyone with this decision including myself I guess. I’m lucky to have my friends around when I needed someone in my life. Loads of love to all my friends.

During certain stages in your life you might be presented with this thin line, if you ask me choose Love and you will never regret it because. “When you know how to love and keep loving you will never be disappointed”.

If you know how to love you will never let your ego or self-respect take over your emotions and hate someone…. Yes thats my next topic Ego vs Self-respect.

— Ego vs Self-Respect —

I read it somewhere that our life has to be a blend of both Ego and Self-Respect for it to be smooth ride.

It seems to me that self-respect is an internal assessment which we make of ourselves in relation to how well we are ‘measuring up’ to our own goals, expectations, moral obligations, etc.  Our self-respect suffers only when we fail ourselves.
Ego, on the other hand, is based on our comparison of ourselves in relation to others.  We assess our looks, performance, assets, or whatever is important to us in relation to what others have or do.  Ego is also very susceptible to others opinions of us.

There are many stages of my life which had put me into this kind of situations… I had my challenges initially which made me very angry because my ego was always taking over my Self-Respect It was extremely difficult to change this because it needs a lot of will to change yourself to be a good combination of both. I have to be frank about it, my ego took over my senses lot of times in different stages of my life and i tried to compete with people thinking I’m better and later realized that somethings are not my cup of tea.

So what did I do ? I chose the right tool “Feedback”. Thanks to the person i respect when it comes to this, one of my previous boss JK. Yes it sometimes is very hard to accept it which also brings me to another part of the conversation which is…

— “Feedback vs Opinion” —

The main difference between both of them is simple, its the person whom you are asking for feedback.

So the initial struggle started of asking for feedback from the people around me, one person said “I’m too loud and am very rude”. Someone said “I’m a very soft spoken down to earth kind”, Now you understand what kind of an issue I was facing…. I was taken back by the whole concept of feedback that started making me more confused and loose confidence.

I was feeling very low and someone unexpected helped me on this… “Wife”. One day I was explaining an issue at work and asked her if I did the right thing ? Her answer was ” why are you asking for my “feedback” when I’m not a qualified person in that area. She continued on to say that you are best at what you do this is my “opinion ” but if you ask me to give “feedback” I don’t have the expertise to give you any”. After this discussion I realized that I have to understand the difference between opinion and feedback and this understanding gave me the right approach. But the challenge was how do I know who will give me an opinion and who will give me a feedback. When i read some books, watched a TV series to understand people and their psychology. One good book was “how to read a person like a book”. One good TV series was “Lie to ME”.

When I started asking the feedback from the right people my confidence rose to higher level every time I was given a feedback. I started working on the feedback and today I’m who I’m because of this very effort.

Today I can confidently say that, anyone can have an opinion about you and give you a feedback, but it is left to us if we realize the difference.

What should you take away from this ? Is it easy to work on feedback and achieve the right results ? My answer is “NO”. The steps for the whole process is as follows :

1. Do you realize that your Ego plays a larger part in your decisions ?
2. Do you want to improve the balance between Ego & self respect ?
3. Are you willing to work on your feedback ?
4. Are you ready for the most brutally honest feedback about yourself ?
5. Do you understand the difference between “Opinion” and “Feedback” ?
6. Last and most importantly did you choose the right person or people to get the feedback from ?

After one year of consistently asking for feedback from one person I was told ” I have never met anyone till date who is as passionate as you “. On this closing note of the topic lemme take you to the last topic of today which is….

— Passion vs Compassion —

Almost every time i have come across these words of Passion or Compassion people have use it with the words of Love. Because I’m talking about it today don’t think i have done some etymological research on these words.

Passion by itself is self-centered. When I say I’m passionate about something, the driver of that passion tends to be my own needs, desires, and purpose. It is an intense emotional response to those things which you like or influence you the most.

Compassion I think, is just as intense as passion, but the driver of it is the needs, desires, and purpose of others.

So do we choose passion or compassion ?

My opinion and what i follow strongly is that everyday I desire to be both passionate and compassionate, but mostly the latter because I do believe that what I passionately do for others is a reflection of my compassion.

I have been involved in a lot of discussions or should I say arguments ;) about how passionate some of us are and…then what starts as a discussion always ends in an argument in a group of very passionate people.

But when I was in some other groups discussing about passion it always ended in a learning or acceptance. I later realized that the discussion was driven by compassion.

You can relate this or experience both of these when you listen to some posts or videos of Sri Osho, Sri Ravi Shankar etc..

To put in words on my approach towards life is in the quote below by Maya Angelou:-

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion and some compassion, some humor and some style”

Before I loose your interest in this post lemme retire for the day with the below interesting quotes :

“The Ego is not who you really are. The ego is your self-image; it is your social mask; it is the role you are playing. Your social mask thrives on approval. It wants control and it is sustained by power, because it lives in fear.”

“We can recognize our weaknesses, limitations, and foibles, but this awareness in no way interferes with our ability to fully accept ourselves…Perhaps more than anything else, cultivating self-acceptance requires that we develop more self-compassion.”

Have a pleasant day ahead and c you soon in my next ….