choice of perspectives (2)

i have a friend, almost an ex to be exact. he was supposed the one before james, but he rejected me... and i was a bitter person and i avoided him after that. but in recent years, i have decided to forgive and forget. after all, life is too short to hold grudges. and i looked him up and re-established contact with him. and we sms each other once a while.

i noticed this one thing - he is a terribly negative and bitter person. from our smses, it seemed to be that he has a negative view about everything in the world. he is afraid of pain, he is cocksure that every person will go against him, that and every thing that can possibly happen will be to his disadvantage, he is confident that bad things will happen to him, and he is petrified that he will be unprepared for the worst, etc... even when he goes for holiday, he will focus on small things like he is going alone and thus, he is cursed for being gay, etc... after talking to him, i sometimes find his negativity affecting me. also, and invariably, by virtue of the fact that i am less negative than him, i naturally become the more positive person. and all the time, in our smses, i will remind him of how things are not as bad as they seemed, and that there are ways to see things from the positive angle, and that he should just live his life to the best he could... our sms exchanges will almost always end with him ignoring me...

and today, i got an interesting sms from him... this was roughly how it went...

him: if you board a bus, and you see a group of 5 over-sized south asians. and they are carrying a lot of things and they are blocking the walkway. also, they did not flash their bus pass and the driver did not want to move until they do so... after a while, one of them reluctantly collected their passes and flashed it. only then did the drive move the bus. how will you respond. honestly. and i do not want any zen type of response....

me: well, i will just look at them and enjoy the experience. i mean, honestly, that is what i will do. i like to people watch and such incidents would allow me to see how the drama unfold and the reactions of people involved, directly and indirectly.

him: but they are deliberately holding us all up and making us all late for our appointments. and they are deliberately cheating the bus company. how can you not be angry with them?

me: well, from your sms, ok, perhaps i am not normal, and so, please do not expect me to give you a response that would meet your criteria of "normality". 

him: that is so you... (he sounded a tat frustrated at my response that did not conform with his expectations)

me: hey, life is stressful enough. so why let such additional trivial things stress me out further? why not focus on the more positive things? of cos there will be times where i will bitch and i will be angry, but i mean, for what right? life goes on. i have learned to see things from the positive perspective. what can i do to change them and their upbringing? nothing right? so, might as well hope they can improve for the better but for the moment, enjoy the many wonders of god that many of us now no longer noticed... eg birds flying, butterflies, orchids blooming on roadside trees... 

he did not reply after that... well, after all these months of non-stop negative smses from him, i learned one thing from him - you cannot change a person if he refuses to change. then again, you can learn not to be like him. and in this case, i actually learned to be a little more positive.