All of us if not most of us have at one point or another faced an awkward moment or even worse were embarrassed on behalf of another(if that is even English or grammatically correct) so a case in point today....Am walking minding my own business and as i just make a turn,a guy is peeping(i lack an euphemism for this) just by the road,sees me and wraps it up and walks on like nothing just happened.I pause,petrified for a second ,wondering if i should just turn back and assume I didn't see anything or just whisk by in a frenzy and act all composed,'normal',maybe a smile here,a blank glance there and go on my way
I know you are wondering what exactly transpired this morning,well,I hesitated a bit but in my indecisiveness he walks on so I follow behind and of course reduce my pace so as not to catch up with him.This proves futile as am a fast walker so I end up getting ahead not in anyway to make him shrink but had to be somewhere and am getting late and for a second I wonder why am the one feeling all embarrassed and I didn't do anything,he he.
It beats me how one can act in ways that make us want to crack up the universe and disappear deep into oblivion which begs the question what makes one thing embarrassing and the other totally 'okay'.Is it contextual,age related,a set of norms of dos and donts,protocol maybe,plain common sense,or simply based on the kind of reactions that we get from those around that makes the 'embarrometer'(embarrassment meter) to blink!
Kids,for one,especially toddlers are usually free and do whatever they deem fit and no one sees a problem with it.The have the privilege of undressing in the middle of the living room whilst visitors are very present!They can sit in whatever position they are most in comfortable in,eat in whatever style they find fun and so much more.So am trying to imagine how parents deal with such situations,do they dismiss them as just a joke and carry on with their hospitality.How about the guests in question,what do they do?As we all grew up to be adults and what have you,it is said or rather believed that we begin to get a general sense of right and wrong and we avoid certain behaviors because they are considered 'shameful' and we pursue patterns that are considered ordinary and acceptable.
All these then leads to matters of topic so that we question what issues would we rather shy away from and resign that they are 'sensitive',not exactly embarrassing,for we do not want to raise an alert,an alarm that will flutter a myriad of negative perceptions about who we are,our core values especially those with egocentric tendencies.
Some societies still find it daunting to discuss aspects that pertain to our sexuality,physical defects,and even for some,health concerns.If you are continuing to read this then I salute you for some gave up in the introduction section for the term 'peeping' was just not something they could not stomach,a total turn off,quite embarrassing for their taste.It is understandable in the sense that we have our presuppositions on almost every issue before we dig in to find out facts.I would never advocate for one to share with all and sundry all the aspects of their lives and that's why we have close friends or family for that and for some secret diaries.
In this day and age,where do we draw the line between being explicit or too closed off,being callous or too sensitive,living in ignorance or basking in the extreme light of self awareness?Without us even knowing it,we all have placed certain 'unwritten rules' on people at social events,at home,school,at work and even in the public arena so that we expect and to a great extent demand that they withhold a particular standard of decorum. Embarrassing moments are usually taken to be'isolated incidences' so that one says that it is something that has never happened before so when we break these societal rules that hang about us like a dark cloud are we to be discarded as lacking class.Like when your child is throwing a tantrum at a supermarket when you cant afford to buy something she wants or when you give a rather 'silly' answer to a question in class and even if the lecturer insists that no response is wrong you somehow cave in and batter yourself for even speaking up in the first place.
So where does it end?Embarrassment is part of us,some great thinkers have been quoted in the past saying : 'If you have never been hurt or embarrassed then you are not living life'.In essence it means you are not a risk taker so does this mean we go looking for embarrassing scenarios to prove that we can come out of them with our faces plastered in victorious smiles?
What do you consider embarrassing?lets talk...
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