A taxi driver I was speaking to the other day on the way to a meeting was sharing with me his two cents worth of advice on his life's philosophy. The 60 year old man who was retrenched about 3 years ago was explaining how it was pointless to argue with people. Rebuttals beget more arguments and generate more heat and anger. The best thing to do in an argument is to back off and keep silent.
He was narrating his experiences with unreasonable customers and how in the beginning he had stood for his rights but ended up being angry and miserable. He has since learnt to keep his cool because he realised that even if he were to pick up a customer travelling from one end of our tiny island to the other, the journey would take one hour at most and all he needed to endure was one hour. The fact is that most journeys last less than that and it was unnecessary to create so much tension. He was educating me on how stress and the building of blood pressure was detrimental to the health of people especially of his age.
Now he has learnt to accept that the world is composed of many different types of people with different characters. Sometimes he meets nice people who love to chat, sometimes he meets people who prefer passiveness, sometimes he meets people who are rude and so on. It is natural that we would encounter people whom we can connect and people whom we clash with. Even the best of friends will have conflicting views at times.
In human relationships we have to learn to deal with different people. With the knowledge and acceptance of the colourful variety of human characters, we can realise that arguments will not achieve anything positive.
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