Minding One's Own

If you mind your business then you sure won't be mindin' mine.

-Hank Williams Sr.

How often have we heard heard in our lives, when one person feels they are being pushed by another, that that second fellow ought to mind his own business? With an almost appalling frequency, I'd wager. We feel that we can quite readily instruct everyone else as to the best way of doing things. Perhaps, dependent upon circumstance, we can. Yet I'm rather of the belief that by and large we should never venture an opinion about someone else's tasks or intents no matter what our feeling may be about them.

There are few exemptions to this, if there are any at all. Let me explain that point: I take the tack that where moral right and wrong are concerned you simply cannot argue to be left alone because things beyond your wants and wishes are at stake. Some of your potential actions are the legitimate business of the world at large. That's the ideal reason behind laws: to state the things which are not merely your concern. You cannot steal a thousand bucks from your neighbor and then insist I have to mind my own business when the police question my knowledge of the matter.

That said, I am slow to offer my thoughts about what others think and do without their asking me about it. Where a given thing is their business and in no way, shape, or form mine, on what grounds can I justify the expression of my views? Perhaps as a friend, true, but I should think that most friends would want to respect the parameters of their friends' rights and keep mum.

An example from my life may help. My Grandpa Joe whom I've occasionally spoken about on these pages got into the habit of painting his cars with sponge paintbrushes. That that is silly or, at the least, not the best way to paint a motor vehicle, I won't debate. But it drove one of my grandfather's friends crazy. He relentlessly badgered Joe that you couldn't paint a car with a brush. All that ever came out of it was that they both ended up upset with one another whenever the guy broached the subject.

He should have never brought it up. It wasn't his car, it wasn't his paint, it wasn't him doing the work. It was Joe. So what if it was silly? It violated no moral norms. Shut up and let the guy brighten up his car however he wants to. You only build resentment when you talk as though you are within your right to interfere, when you are not.

In short, if it isn't your time, money, and effort going into it, keep your mouth closed. Unless something is fraught with danger, or even, I'll allow, so foolhardy as to be completely ludicrous, clam up. Mind your own as you would have others mind theirs.