Making Sense Of Life

Do you find some people really annoying? The things they say or the way they behave can be so bothersome and irritating. I know I do and I am sure I am not alone in that! We say things like ‘she makes me so mad’ or ‘he frustrates and irritates me so much’. And maybe there are legitimate things that the other person says or does which are understandably frustrating and annoying. However, the diagram below (from Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) challenges those assumptions in some radical ways. In Biology at school we learnt that for simple organisms like an amoeba or relatively straight forward structures like the knee joint, there is a predictable response to a stimulus. You prod an amoeba and it goes in a certain direction. Or you strike the front of the knee and you get an involuntary knee jerk reaction. But we as human beings are much more complex than that. Granted most people do react to circumstances, but just because they do does not mean you and I have to do the