As college students, we get to meet people from many different cultures and lifestyles and share with them our own unique way of life. The interaction between the different personalities and traditions can be compared to the ‘Take-A-Penny’ plastic tray found in a typical gas station convenience store. We leave an impression on others and sometimes even affect their personalities, just as they impact ours with their words and actions. Eventually, we are all picking and choosing different parts of personalities from those with whom we associate. Slowly but surely, our new personality becomes somewhat of a conglomeration of our original personality along with the personality traits of others. This could be shown through similar word usage when speaking or similar actions in certain situations. For the most part, this is done subconsciously, so we don’t necessarily notice the minor changes to our own character.
Swami Tyagananda explains in perfectly in his article, ‘I Am Your Daughter’, in which he discusses how each of our personalities affects and is affected by those of others.
Our heart is a garden full of seeds, some good and some bad, some constructive and some destructive. We have seeds of love and also seeds of hatred; seeds of compassion and also of cruelty; of restraint and also of indulgence; of trust and of distrust; of humility and of arrogance; of openness and of pettiness… Which of our identities becomes operative at a given time and which seeds get sprouted depend on the particular situation and the people we are with.
The people we interact with every day water certain seeds in our heart and unknowingly leave imprints on our personalities, resulting in a slight change to our character. These changes happen every day and are so subtle that often, we cannot see the difference in ourselves. What we need to be most careful about is when such subtle changes are for the worse. For instance, if a person that doesn’t curse at all is put into an environment when everyone swears all the time, the person will slowly, and unknowingly, acquire the habit of cursing. Although our garden is open for anyone to water whichever flowers they choose, we need to be the ones to decide which seeds we allow to sprout in our personality.
This is, obviously, a very difficult task, for it requires us to constantly gauge ourselves be aware of the changes in ourselves. In order for us to become the best people we can be, we must always be able to test ourselves to determine if the paths we take will help us achieve our goals. At the same time, we should try to be skillful gardeners and ‘distinguish between good seeds and bad seeds, separate them, and water only those seeds that’ll produce healthy plants’ so that our friends can cultivate beautiful gardens as well.
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