Mind Your Own Business

What exactly is "your own business" anyway?

Mind your own business. Take care of your own business.

I am currently enjoying a wonderfully readable interpretation of the philosophy of Epictetus, "The Art of Living". It's written in chunks of a paragraph to a page or two at a time, outlining the important ideas, a la 'don't sweat the small stuff' . Except, its largely bigger stuff, and in a particularly stoic (literally) vein.

One of the segments was titled "Stick with your own Business", in the sense of not allowing others or external circumstances to cause you unneeded pain or stress, in that reconciling yourself to the things you can control (your responses to people and events, the way you see the world, and your actions in it) will make your decisions worthier and more effective. I initially balked, and my instinct was to think but sometimes if you interfere- you help.

This thought was immediately followed by if you're helping, then it's not interfering.
It's become, in a measure, your business.

To illustrate, I'll use a question common in contemporary moral theorizing about just what ones business is. It handily appears on a card in my old version of "A Game of Scruples" (The dinner-party conversation game of relative morals. You see what goes on in my head, eh?).

The situation is this:  You live in an apartment building, and you suspect one of your neighbors of abusing their partner. Do you call the police?

Think about it, for a moment. What would you really do? Act at once? Or doubt, question, and feel knotted with unease?
It would be lovely if everyone's immediate response was "Of course!" and tip-of-the-tongue it can be. But more often people hesitate, if guiltily.  Not from any place of thinking that the situation is right- only what the extent of themselves really is. What if they're just watching a movie and I misheard? What if they like rough sex? Is it any of my business? Or, the equally hesitant but more generous, what if I just make it worse?

I mulled over these considerations, and came to the conclusion:

Yes, that is my business. I strongly believe that a good basis for behaviour is "Do Unto Others" and if I were having the shit beaten out of me in the apartment across the hall, I would want someone to call the police. Or break the door down. Where there is violence or pain that is within my power to stop, I will do so, and feel I've done good by both another and myself doing so.

When people look the other way, or miscalculate what their business might be, or allow violence, pain, and advantage taking to happen to others, its all too miserably easy to believe we deserve it when it happens to us. No one ever does deserve it, to my mind.

If you clean a mess you did not leave, you have done nothing less than leave a place better than when you found it, and every day another person does that the whole damn World gets a little bit better.

What is your own business? The decisions you are faced with, and what you decide to do. There is not enough business-minding going on in our part of the the world. We're too busy trying to pin responsibility, blame, hope, success, and failure on other people or institutions. You can never control what other people have done. You cannot control what other people will do, nor should you. You can control only what you will do, and the clearer ideas you have of what you want to do and what you want to be will define just what your business is. Leaving the world better than you found it- for yourself and everyone.