Measure anew...
The person who behave sensibly is my tailor, he takes my measures anew everytime he sees me. All the rest go on with their old measurements. -- George Bernard Shaw
That is a key point to keep in mind, that people experience, learn, grow, and therefore change as time goes by. The fellow you have seen yesterday, is not the same person today. Life is not a deterministic finite automaton, and not even a probabilistic Markov Chain, you can never predict someone's future or all possible futures, just based on what you've seen from him or her in the past or present. The only thing that stays the same is that people are people, they are human beings, regardless of how cruel or how inhuman they have been so far. So every time we see people, we should treat them as a human being deserves, we should measure them anew.
6 comments:
I very much liked this. It is really deep in meaning, though hard to realize. I need a lot of practice. This will be my new resolution.
Thank you for the great post, and for being such a good friend.
Now that I think about it, it is really hard and needs a lot of practice as you say. I should also make it a resolution for myself. Good luck to both of us my good friend! :)
I sent a comment two days ago:( but there seems to be a problem, since I cannot find it here....
I just wanted to say that it was an interesting point. I have never thought in this way; I agree that people change, but actually I have been offended because of my forgetfullness about the previous measurements... Certainly one should treat the others as what a human being deserves, but realistically changes occur seldom; Real deep changes need a long time and a great effort. I would not say that the big changes in a short period is impossible, but far beyond the power and patience of many people. It would be always good to save the special good and bad chracteristics somewhere in the mind, a feature I lack and found by passing time as an something important... To make it short, it is great not to neglect small changes in the monotonous life, but a lot of measurements do not show much difference. It is not hard to get more experienced, but it is hard to make a real change in your daily attitude; one learns and changes but theoretically not so practically...
Bests
I found my mistake this time....
I did not post it correctly
One can argue that people never change, and if you observe a change in someone, it only means that your initial estimate of their personality and behavior was wrong. Since people are not entirely unlike an extremely complex mathematical function; and since no situation is exactly the same as the one you've "measured" the third party under, any fluctuations in response and manners can be attributed to subtle variations in input parameters.
In any case, I don't believe that people can actually change. In my book, any observed changes in people is because of our faulty measurements in the first place, and not their "changes".
To Yeganeh and yzt: Thanks for your comments, very interesting points and I do have some comments of my own on what each of you said, but I'm running to be able to catch a train and a flight back home in a week (literally!) so it may be sometime before I get back to you on this post.
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