You are fired !!

It is so hard to let go and it is the fear that prohibit us to let go.  Fear of what ?  Security, usefulness and self pride or self ego.  How can we be fired?  For our face and ego, we can always resigned.

This is the feeling of my colleague when his boss jokingly told him that he is fired.  For an American, the word you are fired, it normal and acceptable.  Their culture is often direct, crude and frank.  For American MNCs, they hired and fire.  In good times, they will hire a lot of people to catch up with their orders and in down time, they will just fire their employees.  There is no sense of belongings and both are very loose partners in the working relationships.

For an Asian, it is unthinkable to be fired. It is such a humuliation and ego hurting.  So, for this behaviour, the Americans  came and set up factories.  Asians are considered obident employees and they do not argue and they follow instructions. There often so much fear in their characters that they suffered in silence.

As for my colleagues,  his boss buy him  a lunch the next day but he is still fuming mad for a few weeks. Yes, it is so difficult to let go of the hurt.  We let the hurt keep on biting into our heart and soul while the person who say these words could have long forgotten the incident especially when he is an American or an American trained manager.

In any job, there are bound to be such incidents of the bosses scolding the subordinate.  In my working life, I have been scolded upteen times and I always relate the person who scolded me to be a mad person if there is no facts in his scolding.  Why are we angry with a mad person? Sometimes, people lost their sanity in a moment of madness but some people lost it long or more times than others.

In Buddhist wisdom,  we should control our mind and more our focus to better or happier things.  If think more about it, the more hurt it will bring and it will even affect our life.  The faster we let go of the feeling , the better it will become. We can just change the status of our mind and our life will change immediately. But , our monkey mind always win.  The more focus we have on our monkey mind, the stronger it becomes and it starts to control us.

To my colleague, I told him to let it go as it has been hurting him a few weeks already after he was scolded that he is fired.  Words can do a lot of harm if the listener holds on to it and twist it around many times. It swells from a small droplet to a giant wave if you let it build up the momentum.  I could see that he is very hurt and he wants to resign.

I do not know what he is going to do next but he is not going to make himself better by keeping the hurt close to his heart.  He knows it  but he cannot control his thoughts , feelings and his mind.  It is better for him to be aware of this wisdom before he makes the wrong decision.

I wish and hope that he could bring himself out of his own misery while his boss has completely forgotten about it.

Namaste.