Posted By Imraan Vagar on Aug 21, 2012 | 6 comments

When I was growing up I really struggled to comprehend or decipher what I often experienced to be contradictory, confusing and beguiling human behaviour.

I think that’s because I was brought up to believe that every human being was fundamentally good and that people only ever said what they meant and always meant what they said. But after years of taking people, institutions and society at face value – with damaging consequences – I found that I had to wisen up to what was really going on.

It occurred to me that I had to look deeper – beyond the facade of things…

Peel away the glossy veneer to reveal the inner machinations.

I needed to question more…

Find a way to ‘decode’ those strange transmissions that sounded alright, but didn’t quite ring true somehow.

Cultivate ways to see beyond the cunning rhetoric and spin to uncover the real ‘agenda’ (and it’s been my experience that there’s always an agenda – even when it’s benign or well intentioned).

And finally, I found that I had to acquire deductive (and intuitive) tools to spot and decrypt the subtexts hidden within what people said and did – if I was to avoid becoming embittered, frustrated and completely disillusioned.

It dawned on me that part of the bigger challenge we face as a society is that we get too caught up in looking at addressing the ‘symptom’, while paying scant heed to the ’cause’ or ‘source’.

I always ask myself…”What’s the why?”

To me the ‘why’ is a path to the ‘source’.

And so – when you’re going about your day – and somebody does or says something that confounds, hurts or angers you, ask yourself the same question…

“What’s the why?”

To paraphrase an old English proverb…

Where there’s a ‘why’, there’s a ‘way’…