Relationships- require a strong dosage of humane reciprocation

Relationships- require a strong dosage of humane reciprocation  

Living with certain humane values at all times preferably with everyone is the best reciprocation we can offer to the other souls.

Relationship, morality a long write up some of which are repetitions of certain things I have written on earlier occasions in my blog posts.

As you say Murali it is in many cases obvious that mostly socially enforced morality is due to lack of opportunity or capacity or both.

However, though this happens to be obviously one among the many facts we cannot become oblivious to other facts by over generalizing.

There are various layers and lies in relationships.

Physical and material comforts together predominate mostly.

Everything and anything that feed these needs therefore dominate most relationships at fundamental level though they may not dominate the discourse in society.

They are like a foundation as after all, we are basically animals of a particular species.

Refinement comes with effort, constant cultured upbringing, conscious awareness and intension to become and be a refined and more humane human being followed by manifestation of concomitant emotions and actions and sometimes refined behavior is also manifested through pretension.

So, which layers of relationships get prioritized and when, decide the quality and durability of a relationship.

That’s why in any relationship starting from birth till death there are multiple factors and facets of compatibility with all its expectations and reciprocations and hardly any relationship can be always hundred percent [100%] perfect on various compatibilities.

Besides, like in any aspect of life’s evolutionary trends multiple considerations are involved and injected into every form of relationship with changing circumstances, contexts and situations.

Therefore, trying to confine any relationship within any label as sacred, religious, socially important etc do not hold water for those very reasons.

However, all said and done real and strong relationships in realm of life, are not forged, framed or formed but they are founded on certain innately cherished impulses, common interests and inter related involvements and they need not necessarily have to be time bound –either until further notice or forever come what may.

The warranty of most relationships are based on certain positive values and feelings like unqualified  love or reciprocal treatment of kindness preferably manifested more frequently, besides trust, cooperation, comfort, compassion, humility, sharing and caring, willingness to adjust and to forgive , gratitude and so on.

But most marriages now, and I hold the society of elders guilty, have been reduced to a pompous wedding rituals followed by either openly negotiated or tacitly agreed upon contractual obligations.

The fundamentals of relationship in additions to positive values enumerated earlier are sentiments of various hues, spontaneous affections, emotions, attractions (of any aspect) devoid of socially anointed taboos.

Honestly, if we touch our consciousness and have a conversation with it, then, we all may review our relationships to redefine, refine, sincerely rework or dump them.

Living involves myriad methods and dynamics as it passes through various situations and contexts.

RelationShip is one of the many ships that float or sail through in the ocean of life.

Various factors are important, impact and influence different relationships at different times.

So, we need to understand the context, content, character and contribution of each and every relationship in proper perspective, rather than making over simplified or over general statements involving the word relationship.

So,  we need to develop, design and deliver deftly a well balanced combination of these various dimensions and dynamics which decide lot of things concerning our life , mainly our relationships- i.e. how we relate with everyone else, our own self, everything else and all that exists  and lives outside us and crops up inside us.

I am against usage of terms loosely as well as following things ritualistically without inner involvement.

Life is after all not mere chronology of existence but a meaningful topology of relationships.

We cannot experience life based on past templates nor future projections but can experience life as a live activity at present in the present situation or context.

However, we can imbue our attitude in dealing with any context with some time- tested humane values like compassion, love, forgiveness, humility, sharing and caring.

These will ensure that even during spur of the movement, spontaneous or short tempered reactions, the hurt or negative impact will be less or at least less violent.

Along with these attitudes we must also ensure that every word and deed are- out of concern - calculated, measured, nuanced and calibrated to the context but taking into consideration all the sensitivities and sensibilities of all involved.

Therefore, words and deeds have to be also   nice and diplomatically delivered.

Most importantly egocentric psychological interpretation of actions must be avoided because it will see adjustments or cooperation as compromise and so on.

Every relationship is a many faceted splendor and all the facets together contribute to the splendor, whether it is with persons, books, movies, any art, music, culture, tradition, gadgets, environment, vehicles or anything.

  

The splendor is revealed depending on what lights we use to see these facets.

The bright lights are good attitudes, adjustments, aesthetic appreciation, compromises, collaborations, co-operation, and contentment and so on.

The dim lights are confrontations, control and command mode behavior patterns, ego generated competing, manipulations, scheming, politicizing, hidden agenda, simmering discontent, lurking suspicions, ulterior motives, ingratitude and so on.

Every vibration of every action or reaction or situation is based on relationship i.e. how we relate to/with other persons and things and every relationship is based on reciprocation.

I feel in the ultimate analysis everything is about how we relate with others, with things, with ideologies, with various identities, with the whole environment etc that is going to determine our role and relevance in the world and in our own life. 

The poetry of life and relationship in general has some inherently important, interesting and inevitable refrain. They are broadly as given below and therefore during the course of this write up they may be repeated often:-

That everyone and everything is interconnected, inter related and interdependent in at least some aspects and with varying degrees of intensity.

Everything must be evaluated based on contextual relevance and contribution to life as a whole [which implies the whole physical environment as well as psychological and social environment].

 Every aspect of life has its own intrinsic and inherent attributes/merits which must be smoothly aligned with life and its myriad relationships through proper attitudes.

It is preferable to immerse any topic or subject matter, primarily and basically with its intrinsic elements/components/aspects/attributes intact, into a cauldron which has a mixture of all these- knowledge based analysis, limited perception based on frames of reference and scales of observation, skepticism , criticism, intellectual scrutiny, compassionate emotionalism, humane socialism, rational thinking, contextual relevance [ which includes too many components] , traditions, practical viability, psychological comfort, aesthetic sensitivity, scientific scrutiny etc and churn the cauldron without clinging on to any particular restrictive social, cultural or political or religious identity.

This process inevitably will bring out lot of outputs. We can exercise our freedom and sometimes select and choose some of the outputs. Sometimes the outputs will draw us.

Sometimes away from all or any of our intended searches and seeking, outside the circle of these known paradigms, almost tangentially serendipity will drag us to an oasis of serene clarity.

At all costs the intrinsic attributes must be the predominant factor so that whatever is thrown into the cauldron and however it is churned, the ultimate output must include those attributes so that evaluation is not distorted or desperately doctored to fit into any predefined and expected outcome.

So, what pans out ultimately depends on various factors and aspects some of which are explainable within the ken of logical and rational thinking but some are beyond these.

We can also observe uneasily how the human intellect polished by a rare faculty [compared to other species] of conscious awareness, capacity to think, store the knowledge, retrieve it for reference etc, is mostly, unwilling to take the risk of accepting the uncertain; the intellectually undecipherable and the inexplicable outcomes, even if such acceptance is branded, extolled and promoted as virtues of humility or modesty.

All said and done life has to be enjoyed through living and relationships have to be experienced in the churning process of life. We cannot mask them with any mumbo- jumbo or avoid them through any other means, imaginations, dreams etc however well packaged or marketed or sanctified they may be.

What is happening to relationships now?

Unfortunately, to use the commercial jargon, there is a paradigm shift in viewing relationship by some people of the present generation.

They compartmentalize relationship into different categories. They categorize relationship on a graph as useful, usable, allowing to be used and proportionately their different relationships get disturbed, degraded and destroyed. The more and more they allow themselves to be used for something by someone then it can gradually lead to depression and can at times even become deadly.

They think if betrayal can benefit why not give a kick to gratitude. They have no qualms about placing selfish personal comforts and gratifications over everything else.

That’s why relationships are researched with more emphasis on the prefixes and/or suffixes that are attached to them like marital relationship, professional relationship, family relationship, emotional relationship, intellectual relationship etc.  

These prefixes /suffixes indicate certain specific situations/contexts and certain elements /aspects/factors which predominate in a relationship. They do not define the totality of a relationship.

For example in a professional relationship one may not deal only with purely professional /official matter one will also be concerned about the personal welfare or circumstances either sad or happy one of the other with whom one is professionally engaged. Similarly by emotional relationship it does not mean just any particular emotion but also all other factors that form part of the relationship.

Relationships are not nets meant to get entangled but great networks of connectivity to catch completeness and gain from totality of everything because all are interconnected, inter related and interdependent in at least some aspects and with varying degrees of intensity.

But all relationships irrespective of the prefixes and suffixes they carry are based on certain time tested universal principles and certain humane values, it is these values which are the many facets that give the shine to relationships.

Living with certain humane values in our day to day life is worthier than any other great achievement. We do not need any expertise or special qualification or sanctions to practice these values.

For example sentiments of caring and sharing, if not towards all, at least towards people related to us and whom we come across in life is very important because the impact of such values and principles are too tangible, stark and perhaps stinging at times.

Even when we are aware of all the components of relationships we cannot either make collages or collations and deal with relationship but as mentioned earlier life carries on its constant churning process through various aspects and unfortunately we are aware of only some aspects because of our selective frames of references and all other limitations.

So we must strive to live by certain positive values that we may have inherited and/or acquired and also try our best to bequeath the same to our children.

Very often people take the route of blaming the circumstances as that becomes an easy excuse and say because of various sufferings, problems, frustrations, failures etc they could not lead a life with certain positive values.

Similarly some people who become a little prosperous in their life either in power, pelf or position, they  let everything disappear under their super imposing ego which gets so inflated that they are clouded by a false sense of immortality to external things quiet oblivious of the mortal frame which houses such ego. 

What no one realizes is that we all are after all have certain inevitable limiting factors :- we have a mortal frame made of biochemical organisms which are bound to decay and die one day and even that like our birth is, in most cases, not chosen by us,  but happens all the same.

Reality is harsh and humbling in many ways. All of us always do what we can, what we want to and what we are destined to do. At times one or some of these things predominate over the rest. But irrespective of any of these three i.e. what we can, want to and destined to do, the platform from which we perform them are our inherent attributes and our attitudes.

Unless these two are tuned properly the frequency at which we may encounter life will be jarring and make us realize things the very harsh way.

So, living with certain humane values at all times preferably with everyone is the best reciprocation we can offer to the other souls.