Over 1098023 fights happen around the world every minute. That means every person in the world fights about something with someone at least once every week.And yet, we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. This contradiction signifies something important: we are fighting over a lot of useless crap. Like fighting over things like some guy making up his own stats in his blog posts.
Of the 377 choices we make every day, there are few that make any difference in our lives. One choice that makes a significant difference is what we choose to fight over. For every 10 people that prefer peace and calm and non-violence, there are 72 people that are, well, bored. According to a survey as recent as 30 seconds ago, 75% of the respondents agree boredom is the greatest cause of all fights. You are talking about your vacation in Thailand and before you know, you are arguing about why it’s okay to eat Bananas in the night. And then it turns into how one of you generally thinks he/she knows everything and a countdown of all the previous times one of you was wrong and then you wake up next morning with a headache and the other person tells you that it’s because you ate bananas in the night. And then you quit Facebook.
I can get philosophical like I usually do and tell you that life is short for this sort of an inane behaviour. Or I could be practical and tell you that these fights are inevitable if you live anywhere around human presence. But, practical things like that are sort of annoying. It makes you feel helpless and put up with crap. So, heck, here it is: life’s too short to be fighting over a Banana.
So, how do you confront this choice or ‘pick the battles’ you fight? It’s not the why or the what you are fighting for that matters any longer. You need to ask yourself a really basic question: who are you fighting against? The fights that I have regretted most are the ones I have fought over with an opponent unarmed with a functional brain. And these are the easiest fights to pick because we all feel this need to beat some sense into a dumbass. This is the most foolish way there is into believing you are changing the world.
These fights have an ability to make you look purposeful. They make you believe you are actually doing something useful with your life. They give you a lazy entitlement to stand against everything because you have no clue what to stand for. I have fought over a lot of useless crap all my life. It’s never the temper or the anger I have regretted in the end. It’s the fact that of all things, I decided to fight over something so trivial and astoundingly meaningless with someone I didn’t even know. If reading a random update on Facebook makes you go berserk, the larger question is not what you should be doing about your temper, it’s what you should be doing about your life.
There was a time we had to pick our battles because there was so little time and opportunity to be doing everything. We have reached a point now where fighting random battles with random people has become a normal use of our time.
It’s not the size of the fight in the elephant that matters, it’s the size of the elephant in the fight that does.
Meditations 