Thanks to the Indifferent

Transcript

I was thinking about something that happened to my I must have been in kindergarten or first grade I was 5-6 years old. We would normally walk from my suburb across the bridge to the town library. As a tiny little 60 centimeter tall child walking across the bridge was quite scary.

I always had a fear of heights especially at that age.

Sometimes children are holding hands in 2s walking across the bridge. Well my friend Eli knew I had this fear of heights and he would let go of my hand because he knew that the only thing that was comforting him was me squeezing his hand.

If he let go I would become quite disturbed and he wanted to taunt me like that. Perhaps not the nicest thing to do, even so that helped me.

My mother at that age wouldn’t let go of my hand or if I asked for her hand she would always hold it walking across that bridge.

But Eli liked to taunt me which was great because within a few years I could stand the height of the bridge, just within 1-2 years taking that walk across the bridge once or twice a week. Very quickly I became accustomed to it.

Sometimes it seems like people are out there to get us. Maybe they are, maybe that’s their conscious intention in their mind. In the case of Eli he didn’t wish me harm but he got some kind of pleasure from seeing me struggle a bit. In other cases, there are more serious cases so in the episode I interviewed my friend Georgia Catt.

She had a form of Orthorexia and she would eat and only eating under very specific cirucumstances. If she reached her goals for the day she would eat at 6:05pm and only 6:05pm or whatever it was. Very specific conditions needed to be met. Her mother wanted her to eat so she did her best to meet these very specific conditions to get that meal ready at exactly 6:05 so Georgia would eat.

What happened is that as a result that meant that Georgia became more deeply engrained in this habit. Her mom wanted to help her so much she actually went to the extent of enabling her.

She had the purest intentions it was only where Georgia entered an environment where people had no idea about her unusual culinary demands, people had no clue she could only eat at a specific time.

That was when she started to get better when she was in an environment that was largely indifferent to her condition.

A lot of the time there are things in the world that want to harm us, maybe they do, maybe they are also part of a greater process?

Especially today when we look around we might see things that are very disturbing to us, and we might even venture to call it evil but perhaps it is not evil.

Just as the Chinese farmer is sitting in his homestead and something happens, good or bad who is to say?

We don’t really know what is good or bad for us. We don’t really know. When something that is malicious or appears to be tragic happens to us, we don’t know the ultimate positive effects of that.

I think of another example, someone stole my telephone I was out after dark using my phone in Guadalajara, probably somewhere I shouldn’t have been at least not like that.

It ended up being robbed and the telephone cost me but the rewards in terms of my street smarts far outweigh the costs. Now I am much more aware of what is going on around me. Now I know who is behind me, I look at people’s faces and think this person is unlikely to be a thief, they don’t fit the profile. They look more like a student or this person is quite old and not likely to be running off with my phone and that kind of thing.

As a result, I built those skills. So what is ultimately good for us?

We don’t really know in the moment.

When people are indifferent to us, ,maybe they are bad or evil, maybe they are agents of fate. Maybe they are provoking something greater, something perhaps that we maybe couldn’t have had envisioned beforehand. Maybe that is what we will see in coming years.

Just maybe we should be thankful for those folks who are indifferent.