“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
You are going to be called names, the closest people to you are going to tell you that your ideas would not work, people are going to be mean to you for no particular fault of yours, and you are going to be stereotyped because of your gender, religion, or race. In the age of social media, we have become more unkind to each other, shutting each other up, and not listening to each other is the new norm. Learning to filter out the noise and tune into the frequency you want to listen to, is an act of self-discipline. People are going to try to hurt you with their words and actions but always remember that “It is not what you hear, it is what you listen to.” As the Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl once said “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
It takes someone who is hurt to try to hurt someone else, hurt people hurt people. Most people are going through a lot of things that you know nothing about, behind those smiles is someone that is using their hurt as a cry for help. When people say nasty things or do things that try to hurt you or bait you for reaction, remember the words of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher
Marcus Aurelius who said:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”