Lt Col (Dr) Ratnesh Sinha, Retd
Last week's article on daily practice carried a quiet warning in its closing lines: That the building of self can sound like a solitary labour, undertaken alone at dawn, and that the person who attempts it entirely alone will most often falter. This week takes up that warning directly. The interior is not built in isolation. It is built, to a degree few of us appreciate, by the people we keep around us.
We become our surroundings
There is an old saying that a person is the average of the few people they spend the most time with, and like most sayings that survive, it points at something true. We are, far more than our sense of our own independence will comfortably admit, shaped by those around us. Their assumptions become the water we swim in; their standards quietly reset our own; what they treat as normal, we slowly come to treat as normal, until the borrowed is indistinguishable from the chosen. This happens below awareness, which is precisely what makes it so powerful — a person absorbs the emotional and moral climate of their closest relationships the way a body absorbs the temperature of a room, without deciding to, and usually without noticing.
Makers and unmakers
If this is so, then the people around a person are never neutral. Each of them is, in some measure, either a maker or an unmaker of the self one is trying to build. There are relationships that call a person upward — that assume the best of them, that are steadied rather than threatened by their growth, in whose presence one becomes more honest, more generous, more like the person one hopes to be. And there are relationships that pull in the other direction — that reward the smaller version, that grow uneasy at any sign of change, in whose presence one's worst tendencies are quietly licensed and one's better ones quietly discouraged. Most people, examined honestly, can name both kinds in their own lives. The question this article presses is simply whether a person has ever made the examination deliberately, rather than letting the composition of their inner circle be decided entirely by accident, proximity, and habit.
What the army taught
The author learned this not from a text but from two decades in uniform, where the principle is not theory but daily, visible fact. Nothing forms a human being quite like shared hardship endured alongside others who do not break. In the company of people who hold steady under pressure, an individual discovers a steadiness he did not know he possessed — borrowed, at first, from those around him, and then, over time, his own. The composure of a few sets the temperature for the many; a person becomes brave partly by standing next to the brave. It is simply the same principle this article describes, made unmistakable by the stakes.
Choosing, and being chosen
None of this is an argument for using people, for coldly auditing one's friends by their utility, or for abandoning those who are struggling. That would be a grotesque misreading. The deepest relationships are not instruments, and there is a particular nobility in standing by someone in their difficulty that no calculus of self-improvement should ever override.
It is, rather, an argument for consciousness where most people exercise none. It is worth knowing which relationships call you upward and which call you down, if only so the knowing can inform how much of yourself you place in each. It is worth seeking out, deliberately, the company of those who are themselves trying to become something, for their aspiration is contagious, as surely as resignation is. And it is worth remembering the half of the equation most easily forgotten: That you are, at this very moment, a maker or an unmaker in the lives of everyone around you. The person who becomes steadier, kinder, and more honest changes the climate for everyone who stands near them — which is the truest reason the work was never solitary to begin with.
And it is here, where the self one builds meets the lives that self then touches, that this series arrives at its final question. If a person can build an interior, and if that interior changes not only their own life but the lives around them, then what, in the end, is being asked of us? Next week, the series closes by answering it.
The author's book, The Psychological Revolution: A Manifesto for Human Excellence, is now available as an e-book on Amazon Kindle and Google Play Books
Next week: A Manifesto for Human Excellence — the closing article, in which the whole argument of this series is gathered into a single call, and the revolution it has described is placed, finally, in the reader's own hands.
(The writer is a counselling psychologist, educator and leadership mentor whose research focuses on developing stronger minds through the study and application of the Human Quotients Framework)
