How Tolerance Can Be Embraced

"The highest result of education is tolerance."

Helen Keller

In broadest definition, a teacher could be an ant.  It can teach us how it travels, where it travels, and what it seeks.  This is true of animals and human beings.  Each movement made can be showing one other a way to do something.  (Children are especially good at imitating our lesser behaviors.)

It is interesting when we specialize in a trade or position, we often take our specialty for granted.  Then we are surprised when someone asks us how we manage what we do.  It is important to see ourselves as an individual honing in on given gifts meant to be brought into the world.  It does not matter to what length we teach or share.  To give brief exposure to what we think or do can propel a different individual into their own unique field.

In this process of handing down particular knowledge, we in turn become aware of what the other person is capable of doing.  They may not be able to work our trade, but they have their own thoughts which can in return inspire us.  It is through this learning process we can learn respect for others.  We are not all the same (Thank Goodness!) and our culture can aspire to tolerance of diversity.

Shattered Glass

 

 

"Faith is the strength by which a shattered world

shall energy into the light."

 

Helen Keller

 

 

 

When I was in college, a friend of mine was in a car accident.  His head went through the windshield of his car.  He was lucky to have very little scarring on his face, as the top of his head butted through the glass.  For a long time afterwards, I would watch him in class, picking at his scalp.  He would show me pieces of shattered glass that were still trying to surface through his skin.

 

My past is much the same.  There were incidents that left no scarring to my face, but memories, like shards of glass, unexpectedly break to the surface of my mind. I turn them over and over being careful to no longer prick my skin. 

 

No matter how carefully I work, the pieces never seem to slide into place.  I find myself wondering if the picture will ever be whole or if it will ever stay together again.   It reminds me of my favorite nursery rhyme: 

 

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the kings horses and all the kings men,

Couldn't put Humpty together again."

 

 

Perhaps the answer is before my eyes.  The importance very well may be not to place the pieces together again, but to erect a new picture.  A new refined picture reflecting not the past, but  displaying the light of the present.