Skip to main content

You are you and I am I


The only quote that graced my study table for years was from Fritz Perls:
“I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.”

I picked up those lines in my early twenties when I was no more social or sociable than I am today.  I typed it out neatly on a piece of paper which remained on my study table for years.  One guy who befriended me for years and tried his best to make me both social and sociable was quite upset when I refused to dump that inscription.  Not that I didn’t oblige him by making sincere efforts to become more human by joining certain social circles.  But I was a failure.  Rather I made a fool of myself in any group I chose to join. 

The realisation that I couldn’t be part of a social group without making a fool of myself prompted me to embrace solitude.  Though Fritz Perls’ lines yellowed and the paper on which they were typed died a natural death, the quote continued to live on in my memory as one of my favourites.  I have repeated it time and again in various classroom situations. 

Now that the Nobel prize for economics goes to someone who maintains that human beings are essentially cranky, I’m fully convinced that my choice of solitude was absolutely right.  After all, why would I set my crankiness against the gargantuan crankiness of the world out there?  Let me live with my crankiness and you live with yours.  Hasn’t that been my stand for years and years? 

Let me, then, paraphrase Perls thus:
I live with my crankiness and you live with yours.
I am not in this world to live according to your cranky demands and sentiments,
and you are not in this world to live according to mine.
Live out your crankiness and leave me to my own.
If, by chance, your crankiness matches mine in some way,
let us tango.  Otherwise let us ta-ta.


Comments

  1. Jyotirmoy SarkarOctober 11, 2017 at 9:14 AM

    Very witty writing covering up the psychology of different human being.
    Ending is superb.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pranju chakrapaniOctober 16, 2017 at 6:51 PM

    I will remember the quote. Although I am trying to be a bit social but at the end I keep on making a fool of myself. At best I can enjoy my own crankiness in my solitude, I do believe that I enjoy it the most in my solitude But this soul seeks a person who shares the same crankiness but can one find a twin cranky being? I guess not! But should one pursue to find one? Your views?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 17, 2017 at 7:37 AM

      Am I not in the same position as you? I have lived out the most of my life. Yet I have not learnt the basic social lessons. I don't think I ever will. Yet if I could find another cranky person like me, as you say, I might share the joys and sorrows. But no two persons are alike anyway.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more