Making the Difference : Conformity or Assertiveness?

Making the Difference: Conformity or Assertiveness?
I have always felt that we live in a Pavlovian world, for we live our lives with the conditioned response to the demands made upon us by others and by a man-made environment, limiting autonomous creative and free-flowing intercourse among people and their environment.The individual freedom that we realize through personal interdependence on people and the environment gets diluted when you are not allowed to be yourself.This predicament can only be changed if we as individuals awaken to the fact that each person’s world is determined by his own perspective of the environment ,which most often we take it as given and certain. The conventional perspective constrains and prevents individuals’ from being themselves and looks at the world around them in newer and meaningful ways.
When you live in a convivial environment, that is dynamic, being individualistic poses quite a few problems. The individual freedom, freedom of thought and expression gets diluted as we experience a paradigm shift in the way we look at events and people around us and put others before self. While the urge to be ME grows stronger, the very objective of being assertive loses its significance when empathy, understanding and compassion get subsumed in our conscious. This metamorphosis dictates our behavior, attitude, thoughts, actions, as it facilitates a smooth and stress-free life.
Am I then advocating conformity as a rule rather than an exception? Can conformity nurture self-expression and freedom of thought and action? Is it a guiding principle that has to be followed? While the answer is non-affirmative, my personal experiences have made me walk the tight-rope and made me stick to the acceptable “norm of conformity” to my own chagrin and peril.
It is this very adherence to the “norm of conformity” that has made me run into many rough weathers ‘in life. This adherence is taken as my weakness, and vulnerability rather than my willingness to forsake self to appease others. The empathy that flows out of this is neither understood nor appreciated. We see instances of these in our everyday lives making us ponder over the issue of “conformity” and “assertiveness”. When you transcend from the assertive mode to the conformity mode, I must agree that you are looked upon as a convivial person.
This brings us to the question isn’t this self-transcending capability is what we need to build a convivial society? Or is it the way our self-assertive tendency takes the upper hand to establish its supremacy? The answer to this can be traced in history, in fact in our own backyard. Wasn’t this self-transcending attitude of Mahatma Gandhi a vehicle for his self-assertiveness which in the end set us free? Or Mother Theresa to achieve what she set out to?
On introspection, I have come to understand that being self-assertive requires accountability and the courage of conviction contrary to the belief that those “who want to break free” are blind to their environment and people around them. To achieve equilibrium in our lives, and relationships, as I have come to terms with, requires a paradigm shift , for when we start to see the world around us through the eyes of others, it brings with it immense joy and smiles on faces. Isn’t this what we all strive for !!!!!!