Do You Act, Or React?

–Condensed from an article by Sidney J. Harris in the Chicago Daily News


I walked with a friend, a Quaker, to the newsstand the other night,
and he bought a paper, thanking the newsboy politely. The newsboy
didn’t even acknowledge it.

“A sullen fellow, isn’t he?” I commented. “Oh, he’s that way every
night,” shrugged my friend. “Then why do you continue to be so polite
to him?” “Why not?” inquired my friend. “Why should I let him decide
how I’m going to act?” As I thought about this incident later, it
occurred to me that the important word was “act.”

My friend acts toward people; most of us react toward them. He has a
sense of inner balance which is lacking in most of us; he knows who he
is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return
incivility for incivility, because then he would no longer be in
command of his own conduct.

Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of
emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but
in the world outside him. His temperature is always being raised or
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 shaken opinion of himself. Snubs hurt him, and the merest
suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness.

Serenity cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own
actions and attitudes. To let another determine whether we shall be
rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over
our own personalities, which is ultimately all we possess. The only
true possession is self-possession.