Mood Influenced Sort of Greeting

I was just passing by a market place. There were to women who were shopping foodstuffs. One of them suddenly uttered some words that could be roughly translated as “At times she acts as if someone takes her husband away and the other time as happy a new bride.”  She said this words referring to a nearby woman who just passed along the same sidewalk without greeting them. As the phrases were not ordinary but rather impregnated with meaning, it took me no time to be very keen on the message the woman tried to convey through such words. So, I was busy trying to interpret not the literary but the implicit meaning. It was  in an attempt of explaining to her friend who was also not certain what exactly such words mean, the woman who uttered those words freed me from getting exhausted wandering from one thought to another and from one interpretation to another.  The whole idea conveyed through the implicit words is all about being moody in greeting people. There are times where one encounters with people who have a fluctuating mood. Some people behave inconsistently the way they greet people as if they have been conditioned to certain behavior, no matter whether they are greeting someone intimate or someone whom they recently get introduced with, they just show indifferent gesture which makes one feel irritated.

Sometimes one may meet an old acquaintance, but just to be welcomed with an uninviting gesture despite the intensified eagerness of meeting him or her after the elapse of so many years.

I also happen to meet some individuals who greet people in gesture that fluctuates each time. An unpredictable sort of greeting swings back and forth. So, I wonder if I could understand the swinging of their greeting pendulum so as to be tuned with and to exactly accord my mood with that of the unpredictable equilibrium of theirs. However, I often fail to do it so.

My childhood friend once told me that he used to make close observation of any item which attracts him most. However, during the course of his observation he gives no attention to people around him but just to the object which grabs his attention. Any person may mistakenly think of him as someone who is busy in making detailed observation in the life of other people.  It is when greeted warmly by the people whom he feels are strangers that he understands he was too much engrossed with the details of the object at the scene. The problem with such people is not that of being moody but that of being too much focused in items that they like to posses.

There are also people who are always friends in need and not in deed. Apart from the subject which interests them most they give no heed to any personal connection or emotional attachment of any sort. At times, they act as if someone never exists and as if they live in solitary far away from people in an abandoned cave. Everything gets erased from their mind, no image, no name and they quit remembering the good times they spent with a friend and rather started to get recovered when a situation demands an assistance of a long forgotten friend.  I wonder why their mind is preoccupied in the purist of only individual goals at the cost of societal relationship and endangering friendship. Why such people let their mood or interest control them is what makes me usually wonder.

There are times where someone feels depressed, there are times where everybody is in hurry, and there are also times where one’s mind is preoccupied with thoughts. But, this does not happen all the time and there is no reason for being inconsistent in approaching people. The worst is greeting people warmly until achieving vested ends and undermining the good deeds of people who have been one’s right hand in times of need.

Such moody sort of greetings may tempt one to request a time table for somebody’s temper or mood so as to get tuned in accordance to that of theirs. As if they have a behavior like that of a traffic light, the way some individuals greet people are different in manner.  Like that of the three colors of a traffic light they signal different gestures as per the need they set out to achieve.

A friend of mine once told me an English saying that goes as follows:   “A dog wags its tail not for its owner but for the meal at the hand of the owner.” The message conveyed through this saying is that of an interest based loyalty rather than a selfless act of friendship.

This sort of greeting which is influenced by circumstances or any individual interest in a way that disturbs intimacy of people is the subject the two women who were engaged in shopping foodstuff raised and discussed a great deal of it. It finally makes me to deeply think of it while simultaneously forced me to meditate on the idea of mood influenced sort of greeting. Let’s think of our greeting approach and make an assessment whether it is genuine, mood influenced or an interest based sort.