The true function of imagination

Both the pity-bearing and sympathetic person will recognize our troubles; they both may say 'poor you.' But the pity bearing person does something cruel by implying that the mess we're in is only ours. They must remind us of the distinctiveness of our situation and keep us at arm's length.

The consoling friend is mature enough to know that everything we are suffering from could touch them one day too. This emotional background will lend sincerity to their words of consolation.

The pitying person knows how desperate our situation is, but then use their energy to make it clear that our sorrow is ours alone and that any similar horror could not ever touch them.

They need to create a wall between our condition and theirs. Their intentions are sweet, but they will not recognise that they are as open to madness, foolishness, accident, and suffering as we are.

We perhaps don't realise that seeing another person's face can discourage us from speaking the truth. We may hold back and edit our presentation in the light of their reactions.

With Sigmund Freud's example in mind, we should find our own forms of horizontal conversation. After dinner, we might suggest that we all go and lie down somewhere and become newly conscious of voices and nuances when we don't have to look at others' expressions.

When dealing with someone annoying, the way forward is not with silence or rage. We are ideally looking for a way to be polite and honest, or civil and forthright.

To achieve this, we should accept that not everything we desire will please others. We could explore and hold on to what we want nevertheless. At the same time, we should distinguish between what someone does and what they meant to do.

We're seldom very good at perceiving someone's motives when an incident drives us mad. We see intention where there was none and escalate a situation when the agitated response is not warranted.

The less we like ourselves, the more we may appear in our own eyes as plausible targets for mockery and harm. The ideal complaint emerges when we remove the paranoid assumption.

Instead of making relationships complicated and overambitious, we can just take care of these three essential but overlooked aspects:

1. Kindness: A person who is humane and kind, gentle and not too serious.
2. Shared Vulnerability: A person who is a good, empathetic listener, and makes us open comfortably about our anxieties, problems and worries.
3. Understanding: Someone who has a deep understanding of our traits, quirks, features, obsessions, and the way we see the world. Someone who is interesting enough for us to want to understand.

Paradoxically, by limiting our expectations about our relationship, we can concentrate on the three critical ingredients of kindness, understanding and vulnerability, and have a simple yet loving connection.

By simplifying and clarifying, we can release ourselves from our complicated conflicts and pursue a deep and profound bond.

Even if we feel that we have made our point, painstakingly making our parents understand the time we felt they did us wrong, we erroneously assume that our twenty-minute discussion will suddenly cure them of behavioural patterns that are in effect from several decades.

An outright bad parent is easier to handle, but the problem is complicated when the same parent is also caring, loving and is a genuine well-wisher.

While we may think that our parents are conflicted personalities, we are unconsciously having the same kind of behavioural patterns.

We periodically love and hate our parents, and have them imbibed in our body and mind, right down to mannerisms and quirks. We care for them yet sometimes wish to stay away from them.

You could tell everything as a tragedy, or you could tell an equally valid and far kinder story. You could say that you made some serious errors, as every human will, and you paid the price for them. Nevertheless, you tried to be good and loved a few people properly. Despite everything, your heart is in the right place.

The difference between hope and despair depends on the way of telling conflicting stories from the same facts.

... who has been internalized. You're speaking to yourself as someone else once talked to you or made you feel.

You should acknowledge your failures and be happy to make amends. But you also have to stand back from this critic and question what they are doing in your mind. They don't have a right to walk as they wish through the rooms of your mind.

In psychological terms, our minds have a certain bandwidth within which we can tolerate discomfort, a certain speed range in which we can drive with ease, taking care of the challenges and problems. This is known as the window of tolerance.

If we cross the upward barrier in this speed range, we feel terrified, guilty or shameful. If we are below the bottom threshold of this window, we feel lonely, bored, alienated and numb. Remaining within the Window Of Tolerance is our daily challenge as we zig-zag between various emotions and try to keep ourselves sane by self-regulating the mind to remain in the ‘harmonious’ window, while not being stagnant.

If we continuously feel a lot of distress and draining, we should recover ourselves by moderation in eating and drinking, meditation, reading, exercising, and ample rest.

We need to be aware of the direction and trajectory of our moods, emotions and feelings, and make use of introspection and self-observation to get us out of possible pitfalls, avoiding a ‘crash landing’ at a later stage if we do not pay attention.

Work is the effort we make to get what nature did not provide us automatically, or what is not in abundance. We need food, water, shelter, clothes, and basic necessities that make our lives easier. We invent tools to help ourselves where nature didn’t help us.

Example: We couldn’t carry too much water in our cupped hands, so we worked and made a bucket to carry it.

Apart from simple mechanical objects that define what tools are, like a hammer or a bucket, tools can also have broader meanings like:

• A book is a tool to preserve our ideas and memory.
• A painting can be a tool to preserve the beauty of what we see or imagine.
• Religion can be a tool to drill into our minds the ideas of morality and consolation that we otherwise will not want to think about.

Diplomacy is the art of promoting an idea or cause without unnecessarily inflaming passions.

It involves an understanding of the many parts of human nature that can lead to strife and a commitment to handle these with foresight and grace.

Within a negotiation with someone, there is often a request that they change in some way.

A diplomat knows that it is futile to state the call to change too directly as many insist on having their way. Behind the arguing may lie a need for appreciation and esteem.