by Nimi Princewill
There’s always a moment for everyone, when doing the right thing doesn’t quite seem your first instinct. You recall that moment you purchased a ticket for a massively hyped show and you stood under the sun endlessly for your favorite artist to come on and preparatory to that, a wack upcoming rapper/singer was nudged on stage to whet your appetite for the real deal, but he kept rambling on and on doing the exact opposite of that? Oh..yeah, remember you booing him out, and in some cases depending on how much he annoyed you with his wack music, you threw sachet/bottled water and other weaponry on stage to punish him for daring to waste your time with anything less than his very best!
You also recall those state-of-the-art moments we cruised into church in our best outfit, tailored to the specificity of our personality, while a ‘mere’ Usher with a rehearsed signature smile directed us to a seat, but we were better off elsewhere and ended up ‘ushering ourselves’ to a different place of comfort? (sure you remember.. It hasn’t been so long you did that). We have all in diverse ways broken- ‘The Social Protocol’.
To another interesting turn of events, recently, a gospel artist complained about an incident where a fellow gospel artist got on stage to perform the song of his colleague who was billed to minister at the same event! Whether in form of a medley or as an outright show of superiority, that was an alarming breach of protocol!
Many times as Christians, we try to overkill the process of arguing out our faith and presenting it blameless to anyone who feels differently. It is crucial to note that while we are deeply rooted in the concept of Christianity being ‘the light’, a Muslim or Atheist, or whatever religion feels equally the same passion for his/her faith as well. Simply let it go and make nice! There are times we are also guilty of speaking in our local dialect when there’s a third person in our presence who doesn’t understand it.
How do we handle conversations with people? Are we so negative for others to hang around with, that instead of training ourselves to always give compliments, we rather use buzz-kill sentences like “How come you got so much acne on your face?”, “Been so long I last saw you, you’ve grown some terrible belly fat!” or sarcastic comments like “Wow! You’ve gained so much weight, I’m sure if you could shake off some of that weight, you’ll be a swimsuit model!”. Do we just show up unannounced at people’s homes without first putting a call through?
We know right off some people can get really chatty when we get them started, but why nastily try to cut them off when they aren’t done talking? It could take quite a millennium, but there’s sure a happy medium in being a good listener(you got them started in the first place!)
Funny enough, some couples actually do not really require a third party involvement in their fights before their dirty linen is thrown wide in the open, because when it gets heated, neighbors from three miles away can be assured of an inexhaustible dosage of classified family secrets, which would be debated upon by gossips when next these couples put up a show smiling like everything was alright.
In all our little ways of verbal or social media interaction, we have jettisoned in some way, the protocol of socialising which has propagated avoidable issues like unnecessary internet fights (Twitter rants and the likes), religious hatred, marital crisis and so on. But we can create a better world of mutual respect by immersing ourselves deeply in the right social attitude.
Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
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