“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
I love this quotation, but it simultaneously irks me. Let me explain—at first read, or “hearing” if someone utters these words to you, it provides a solidly powerful axiom to live your life by: be strong, manage your emotions, and only give your vulnerability key to people you trust, thus granting them permission to one day unintentionally hurt you, and this might hold true for the second, third, and maybe even the fourth read, or hearing; but when you concentrate longer on this quotation, and maybe gain my skewed world view or filter, you start to see another side, another possible interpretation, more likely an unintended meaning.
See it yet? Probably not because this interpretation might be a “reach” even for my standards, but after deep consideration, this quotation appears to imply the person allowed to hurt you is conscious of holding your vulnerability key, or better yet, that you have admitted to yourself you handed over this key. In most instances we are conscious of the people we have allowed to hurt us, but in rare cases, we are blindsided because we have not fully evaluated a person's meaning in our lives. So in these cases, a person can most definitely hurt us, whether we gave the person permission to hurt us or not. And if we ignore this hurt, because we believe we have not given this person the key, who might not have even realized their words or actions could hurt us, we might miss out on a powerful and significant relationship.
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