Musings of a confused mind -_-

Too much of time to kill during the commute to office makes me ponder upon random topics. So one fine day, I re-bump into this one thing which has been on my mind for quite long time.


How easily our, or rather my, minds becomes prey to opinions or comments about other people and forms an opinion by itself. Whatever someone might tell you about somebody seriously impacts your mind, which thereby impacts the way you interact with them.It is not that you judge them but still, there is this small preconceived notion / opinion about them in your mind based on what you have heard.


I've personally felt this quite a few times. In some cases, even before I've actually met a person, I've a thing about them running on my mind. How? Thanks to my ears and the people I am surrounded by. More often than not, we engage in conversations where we may come across something being told about someone whom the speaker might know, but the listener(s) don't. These kind of conversations are unavoidable. However, my point here is, sometimes they do affect my mind and create this preconceived notion about those unknown people, which I feel ain't the right thing to do. See the contradiction here, my mind knows it isn't the right thing to do, but it still does go on and do it. -_-


Two specific instances which have made me ponder so much over this topic are -


Instance 1: There was this distant relation whom I have never met, but have heard quite a lot about him from my aunt, like, how he usually had his way of getting things done and how dominating he was. Listening to all this, made my mind conjure up the term dominator whenever I hear his name. And one fine day, when I finally had a chance to meet him, I found out that he was anything but a dominator. But then, even after knowing that he isn't anything like what I thought him to be, my mind still doesn't let go off its initial thoughts.



Instance 2: This is quite similar to the first one, exception being, here I've met this person and talked and felt her to be good. And then along came a good friend who just had to say she wasn't as sweet as she was the first time I talked to her. I don't quite know what made him say that, but my poor mind had already fallen prey to that comment / opinion and started its own chain of thoughts. Weird I say. Now every time I see her, I stay away because I feel guilty about my own mind and its thoughts.


I wonder if the problem is just with me or does this happen to everyone? Is there any way out of this?