Do you act or do you react?

A few years ago, I read an article titled “Do you act or react?” and I want to share it with you in my column this week. As you read it, think about how you would act or react if you were in a similar situation.

I walked with my friend, a Quaker, to the newsstand the other night and he bought a paper thanking the newsie politely. The newsie did not even acknowledge it.

“A sullen fellow isn’t he?” I commented.

“Oh, he is that way every night,” my friend said.

“Then, why do you continue to be so polite to him?” I asked.

“Why not, why should I let him decide how I am going to act?” my friend replied.

As I thought about this incident, it occurred to me that the most important word was act. My friend acts toward people that most of us would react to. He has a sense of inner balance that is lacking in most of us. He knows who he is, what he stands for and how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility for incivility because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct.

We are told in the Bible to return good for evil and we look upon this as a moral injunction, which it is. But, it also is a psychological prescription for emotional health. No one is unhappier than a perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself where it belongs but in the world outside himself. His spiritual temperature is always being raised and lowered by the social climate around him and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements. Praise gives him a feeling of euphoria, which is false, because it does not last and it does not come from self-approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should because it confirms his own secretly shaky opinion of himself. Snubs hurt him and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in anyway rouses him to bitterness.

A serenity of spirit cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another person determine whether we should be rude or gracious, elated or depressed is to not have control over our own personalities, which is ultimately all that we possess. The only true possession is self-possession.

As I thought about this article, I realized just how much this affects us every day of our lives. It is not too difficult for most of us to act nicely, especially if we have had the proper training when we were growing up. However, it is just human nature to react to others in a negative way when they are rude, thoughtless or ungrateful toward us.

The Apostle Paul gave us the answer to this problem in Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

The key to improving our human relations is to renew our thinking each day with good, honest and positive thoughts until it becomes a habit. Then, when someone is rude or thoughtless, we will act toward them in a manner that is in our own best interest.

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