We made a trip back to Adelaide earlier this year to visit my husband’s family. This is not something we do very often….my hubby’s family take issue with me, and it seems often enough with him too! Over the years there has not been a lot of love lost here…there has just not been a lot of love….but both his parents have been ill, and we felt it time to let bygones be bygones….our kids have never really known grandparents (apart from my Mum) either and their older sisters (from my previous marriage) have the most adorable set of grandparents, so it seemed necessary to try more proactively for some kind of relationship here, for everyone’s sake. It wasn’t a huge success but it was not a failure…and there have been family lines opened that feel positive…family is so precious it seems such a pity that we can let it slip by us for any reasons…the issues here seem to have been that I am older than my partner, that I have been married before….that my Hubby has lapsed his religion and is a bit alternative and I of course only encourage this!! Silly reasons really that in the final observation do not matter, but why wait till death is staring a person in the eye before letting down our guard, before forgiveness, compassion and acceptance….religion teaches all of these wonderful things, but in the name of religion often we find ourselves doing just the opposite. Why is that humans are threatened by any way/approach or belief that is not of their own choosing? And what of religious, ideological or social tolerance then??
Tolerance is a funny word obviously! Let’s face it, it comes from ‘to tolerate’, which means merely to put up with and often intimates a sort of sufferance in the process.
Wikepedia describes Toleration and tolerance as "terms used in social, cultural and religious contexts to describe attitudes and practices that prohibit discrimination against those practices or group memberships that may be disapproved of by those in the majority. Conversely, intolerance may be used to refer to the discriminatory practices sought to be prohibited. " So there you are non-acceptance, merely a putting up with! A kind of sly discrimination, even condescension.
It would be such a nice Utopia if tolerance died in the arse and was replaced by acceptance….the ability to allow for differences and not judge them...isn’t the concept of religious tolerance after all a misnomer? Religion generally preaches non- judgment and tolerance implies a judgment. Ah…the hypocrisy of it all…but there you go we all judge, pretty much all of the time…when we observe how others live, the choices they make and so on, and pat ourselves on the back for the much more learned, compassionate or whatever decisions and choices we have made etc…and me now in writing this, as well as me later when I watch the News and see views that appall me…like accepting China and her Human rights abuses…ahh, the Utopia of acceptance??? (Is nothing ever straightforward and is there never a moral High ground I can climb to???)
So what am I asking in human relationships then…what allows the past to be the past and bygones be bygones…what lets people offer friendship, support and time to each other regardless of differences, to love each other unconditionally….we are such a conditional oriented tribe…we require others to approve of us, we require others to accommodate us, we want this smile, that look, this support, this word….or we are annoyed, non-compliant, self justifying…..how do you get out of this circle of emotional blackmail that smacks of attachment to any number of things….like how we should feel, how we would like to feel, what we expect of people, situations, life in general….
Honestly I do not know, but lately I have been trying to let people be themselves without my attendant needs of them….and I have made an effort to let go of my judgments on their choices and their actions…and I have given the space that these emotions used to take up in the time I spent with individuals and interacted with them and thought about them to an enjoyment of them and their inclusion in my life…and you now what…it is so much more satisfying…..
So I am glad that we visited Mike’s parents and I am glad that we can talk and laugh and cry together….and I appreciate their humanity…as I appreciate my own…with all its dichotomous behaviours! Who needs to understand anyway…and acceptance is full of its own attendant dichotomies…so just being with is enough for me for now…
No comments:
Post a Comment