There was this restaurant that was opposite my Grad school building that had this framed poster of a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt on Gossip. It read:
"Great minds discuss ideas;
Average minds discuss events;
Small minds discuss people."
Since I had a very sheltered childhood, and since I was more focused on enjoying my freedom as I got away from parental/grand parental supervision, I had been oblivious to discussing people around me. It has taken me a decade or so to understand the gravity of what gossip actually means. One of the hardest things I do now is controlling this innate tendency to gossip. It is so easy to talk about people. Even though people are way more complex and multi-faceted than ideas or events, when we talk about them , we portray only a certain perception of them based on a singled out event. Whenever I have failed, I have regretted it as something in me cringes and dies a slow death. This happens even when I have spoken what I have perceived to be good about people who are absent.
I have been trying to detoxify my life by trying to adhere to the simple philosophy of the three wise monkeys: See no evil; Hear no evil and Speak no evil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_wise_monkeys).
It has been working out fantastically so far with cheat days every now then ;). Working hard on reducing the number and frequency of those cheat days is my challenge now.
