Shoelace Moments

I walk up to the office printer. I find that there is an error message. before I can read the message a lady storms in and says “Is it printing at all?”. Before I could reply she says, rather rudely, “ No point staring at it and wasting time!”; I read the message ” Add paper to tray 4″; she loads the paper, picks up the first print out and barks “Is this yours?“. I am looking at the printer queue and I notice that the first several prints belong to a different user and and tell her “Looks like they are all yours”; She looks at the queue and barks “No, mine is not even in the queue, I am just checking”! So this super efficient lady has not even sent out a proper print!

I wonder “What makes this woman act so rude? Is it her self assessment of being superior because of her position and/or color? What will be her reaction if she knows my background and how many such ‘super heroes’ have I managed and mentored!”.

So how do you react in such circumstances? I remind myself of a story I have shared often with my daughter, Raksha.

Ekanth Easwaran, the spiritual teacher, (http://www.easwaran.org/about-eknath-easwaran.html) explains this beautifully.

“As he was growing up in the Indian state of Kerala, Eknath and his friends used to go to the local cinema. As they reached the ticket counter, the boys would reach into their pockets and pool together the coins they had saved. They would find that one of them was bent low, tying his shoe laces and would not look up till the tickets were bought. They knew then that this boy had no coins to spare and was ashamed to admit it. And so they would buy his ticket as well and carry on normally!”

Easwaran goes on to point out how everyone has Shoelace moments in their life and it is best to accept the unacceptable behavior as ‘Shoelace moments’! He points out that we are least affected if we take this approach, even if it was not a shoelace moment and the behavior was intentional!