"Mastering others is a strength, but mastering yourself is true power." -Lao Tzu
When I was a child I was often finding myself extremely frustrated over the actions and words chosen by others. I was constantly getting myself upset over the fact that it is not within my power to change how a person wants to behave or live their life, no matter what my opinion was. I would work on ways to talk to people, to try and get them to believe what I believed or wanted them to believe, think up situations in my head where people saw how I did something and then would want to ask me how I could show or teach them, spending hours and hours lying awake at night just wishing people would be better and could look at the world the way I looked at it. Then I realized the truthful fact that is necessary for all of us to realize someday: I am not perfect.
In the world we live in today, we are constantly seeing turmoil in some part of the world. Shootings, stabbings, bombs, plane crashes, and I am willing to bet that every person, whether they know it or not, wishes that other people could be better. No matter what race, religion, culture, or part of the world we come from, everyone has that little voice in their head that when seeing others' wrongs says "If only they could truly see." We see the clichés in every young teenager, sitting in their room angry at the world because "no one understands" and "people won't let me be who I want to be". Getting so distracted on other people's mistakes or wrongdoings, that we forget to focus on ourselves.
The quote above could apply to many situations and people, however, I think it best applies to this issue, the one thing people just "don't understand." While we wish people would be a certain way, look at us a certain way, see things a certain way, looking at the world in 3rd person will ultimately get you nowhere but lost. Seeing all the afflicting opinions and all of the different mindsets that people have and present is not only a lot to take in and process, but it takes time and mastering yourself is the best way to get there. We cannot change people as easily as we would like to. We cannot make others think as we do as easily as we would like to. However, we do have control of what we, ourselves think and do. It is not selfish, it is not arrogance, it is called self-reliance. Self-trust. Self-bettering. When we learn to understand who we are as a person, the world around us becomes less and less complicated and hectic. We can see why people act as they do, and why people say as they do. We can better understand that while fate and destiny is a very real thing, we have more of a say in it than we previously thought.
Trying to master others or situations we feel necessary is not wrong. However, trying to control one, is. We must not look to take charge of other people's lives and fate, but rather take charge of our own.
