The Shooting of Matilda Grabtree

It was a tragedy of errors. Fourteen year old Matilda Grabtree was just tying to play a prank on her parents. When her mom and dad returned home around the wee hours in the morning, she jumped out of her hiding in the closest in her bedroom, 'Boo!'

When they reached home, Bobby Grabtree and his wife assumed that Matilda was staying with her friends. Hearing a faint noise inside the house, Bobby drew his .357 calibre pistol and went to investigate Matilda's bedroom. When the playful kid jumped from the closet 'Boo!', he took her for the imaginary intruder and shot her in the neck. He was so quick to react that he couldn't register what was happening or recognize his daughter's voice. Twelve hours later, Matilda Grabtree died in the hospital.

How did such a tragedy occur? What drove Bobby Grabtree was fear, one emotional legacy of evolution. He wanted to protect his family from danger. In itself, fear isn't necessarily an unhealthy emotion. In fact, it has protected us over the long course of evolution and ensured our survival. Automatic reactions like this, evolutionary biologists assume, have become engraved in our nervous system because for a long and crucial period in human prehistory they made the difference between life and death. Even more important, observes Daniel Goleman in 'Emotional Intelligence', they were critical to the main task of evolution: being able to bear progeny who would carry on these very genetic predispositions. What a tragic irony given what happened at Grabtree's!

Read the full story of the Grabtree Tragedy at http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/10/us/a-daughter-s-death-a-father-s-guilt.html

The Story of the Black Driver

"Anyone can become angry-that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way-that is not easy." Aristotle,

The Nicomachean Ethics Opening the prelude titled 'Aristotle's Challenge' to his best seller Emotional Intelligence:Why it can matter more than IQ,Daniel Goleman narrates a personal experience. In one unbearably clammy afternoon in the New York City, Goleman who was heading back to his hotel boards a bus up Madison Avenue.The driver, a middle aged black man with an enthusiastic smile takes him by surprise as he greets Goleman 'Hi,how're you doing?' And he extended the same greeting to the other passengers too. It was the kind of weather that would make people sullen with discomfort. So in that morose mood, few returned his greeting. 

As he drove up Madison Avenue, he started an interesting monologue about the attractions around the city,about a terrific sale, about a new movie opening at the theater down the block. His delight in the rich possibilities the city offered was so infectious that most people cast off their sullen shells they had climbed onto the bus with and when the driver shouted out 'So long, have a great day, each gave a smiling response. 

Writes Goleman, "....The memory of that encounter has stayed with me for close to twenty years. When I rode that Madison Avenue bus, I had just finished my own doctorate in psychology-but there was scant attention paid in the psychology of the day to just how such a transformation could happen. Psychological science knew little or nothing of the mechanics of emotion, And yet imagining the virus of good feeling that must have rippled through the city,starting from the passengers on his bus, I saw that this bus driver was an urban peacemaker of the sorts, wizzardlike in his power to transmute the sullen irritability that seethed in his passengers, to soften and open their hearts a bit"

Sleep on your Grudges

How did you react the last time one of your superiors swore at you for a delay in the delivery of a project? It`s quite natural if you felt deep resentment towards whether he was right or not. And what did you do? Did you yell at him? Did you send a sharp email justifying your actions and criticizing his diatribe? Or did you kindly explain to him what had happened and told him that you alone was not to blame for the delay.

Maybe, you should have forgotten it then and there. Impossible? Not at all. Nothing remains the same forever. Neither anger nor resentment takes exception to this universal rule. If you had let it rest or slept on your grudge, you`d probably have woke up to a new dawn of understanding. Whether you call it understanding, empathy or emotional intelligence, it`s all the same at the heart.

What we have to understand is there is too much confusion out there in the world. In fact, ours is a planet with over six billion unique individuals with different attitudes, tastes and tempers. We all have our dreams, hopes, fears and frustrations. More relevant to our context, every one of us has our own insecurities. When something or someone poises a threat our interests-maybe it`s more perceived than real- we tend to feel angry about that.This is so because, inherently, people resist change.

So now you can understand while getting rebuked is certainly unpleasant, it is more important to put things in perspective and not to overreact. Most probably, it`s gonna blow over. So, why keep hugging a grudge?