Maturity

I went to institute last night, where we had a discussion about maturity and immaturity, and the characteristics of each. Stephen Covey talks about dependence, independence, and interdependence as a maturity continuum. Dependance being “you take care of me, you do this for me, I blame you for the results,” namely the way a child behaves towards their parents. Independence is the paradigm of I – I can do it, I am responsible, I can choose. Interdependance is the paradigm of ‘We’, ie we can do it, we can cooperate, we can combine our talents and abilities and create something bigger together.

We didn’t talk about Stephen Covey last night, but we did talk about the two in relation to selfishness and unselfishness. Dishonesty, mocking, not taking responsibility, blame/victimization, judgemental and easily offended on the immature side, and honest, owning up, proactivity, accepting differences, being able to laugh at oneself, giving others the benefit of the doubt on the mature side.

We did a quiz on how we would react in the face of particular circumstances, eg if someone said something offensive, or if we were cut off in traffic, and it occurred to me that I’ve regressed in the last few years. I used to have a much more lenient attitude towards people who annoyed me, especially crazy drivers.

I would suppress my emotional reaction to the situation by discussing possibilities in my head, eg maybe theres an emergency at home and that’s why he forgot to indicate before he swerved into my lane, because he’s busy thinking about what he needs to do once he gets there. Maybe that person just got their restricted, or they’re new to the area and that’s why they were in the wrong lane, coz they don’t know where they’re going and Auckland traffic is confusing anyway.

Lately I just find myself getting annoyed in situations that wouldn’t bother me before, and yelling at people (they can’t hear me of course) and being delighted when people overtake me (while going at the maximum speed limit) and then I come around a corner and see that they’ve had to slow down due to a massive plodding truck. Vengeful and over aggressive. I’ve become much less patient and more apt to judgement and anger, which, while feeling justified, doesn’t really help my outlook on life.

So this is my new goal for the next week. I’m hoping that if I practice it for a while, it will once again become a habit. Everytime I get annoyed at someone, look for a logical madeup or hilarious reason, why they would be doing the thing that they’ve just done. One that paints them in a better light than “what an idiot.”