the road to hell is always paved with a unhealthy does of good intentions

Dear Ian,

Your friend ‘K’ called you an asshole.

All I can say is that, sometimes; a particular word gets stuck in our head and we keep on using it like it was vogue. So he could have been stuck with this word and thinks that it is cool to use it. But you know better.

What I told you to do is, think of this friend during the days of happiness. Nobody is nasty 24/7/365. We are nice by default, there are no evil babies.

People do all sorts of things thinking that it is in the best interest, but people are most of the time, self centred, selfish and they couldn’t see beyond the halo of the ego they created for themselves. So don’t fall into that trap, since the road to hell is always paved with a unhealthy does of good intentions.

So this K friend had been nice to you before, he has helped you brought your homework back when you were ill. He did stood by you (not often though). So he did somethings that sometimes qualifies him as your occasional friends.

So I told you to tell him ‘I like you better, when you were nicer to me.’

It is true, since everyone has a nice side and nasty side, even when we are nasty, we often didn’t know we were being assholes. So you know better than to do tit for tat.He called you an asshole, that doesn’t mean you have to make his wish comes true. You can define the ‘asshole-ness’ in the word ‘asshole’, always remember never play the game by other people’s terms. He want to get his desired attention from you, to allow him to do that will mean that you are playing by his game. You are much better than that, you don’t have to play his game, you don’t have to acknowledge that K is K. Treat him with equanimity, you have plenty of friends, and he has to queue like everybody else, when he jumped the queue, by calling you an asshole, you have to put him at his place, back in the queue. Treat him normal, never accord him the attention he wanted calling you callous names. People do all sorts of things to get you attention, and when they becomes too obnoxious, you have every right to put them at the last of the queue, or take them out of the equation totally.

Plain K

I’m glad you did what as I advise, and the last I heard from you, K did some other obnoxious things to you, you didn’t even bat an eye lid, you just treated him like he was him, plain, normal, nothing new, nothing fantastic. That’s good, because when you are able to control your feelings and deny negativity and nasty people to dwell in your mind space, your life will start to align with the great things in life.