. There is a Quaker saying: ''Let your life speak.'' Describe the environment in which you were raised--your family, home, neighborhood or community--and how it influenced the person you are today.
My father is a hardworking man. Although he often returns from work around ten in the night, he is always calm and levelheaded. My mother is more lively, but shares my father's sensibility. Both of my parents always emphasized the importance of not only tolerating people who are different from me, but also accepting them. Only recently have I come to understand what they meant.
Tolerance implies a grudging willingness to bear with people. It signifies a sacrificial attitude that is only a step away from ostracism. Expressing only a tolerant attitude, it is impossible to fully appreciate what people who are dissimilar from you have to offer.
Acceptance, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean agreeing with the type of lifestyle a person has chosen, but understanding that the person has his own reasons for behaving the way that he does. It is comprehension that your views are just as foreign to that person as his views are to you. Acceptance is not an act of submission, or indifference, but an act of respect and a demonstration of equality.
With this realization, I have come to develop a belief system that since everyone has developed under different genetic and environmental influences, they react in different manners to the same circumstances. I acknowledge our differences in opinions, but I do not allow those differences to impede me from forming close relationships with that person. Because of this, I have developed close friendships with people of many varying ethnic and ideological backgrounds.
Tolerance does not breed the unified society necessary to tackle the world's many problems. Acceptance does.
My father is a hardworking man. Although he often returns from work around ten in the night, he is always calm and levelheaded. My mother is more lively, but shares my father's sensibility. Both of my parents always emphasized the importance of not only tolerating people who are different from me, but also accepting them. Only recently have I come to understand what they meant.
Tolerance implies a grudging willingness to bear with people. It signifies a sacrificial attitude that is only a step away from ostracism. Expressing only a tolerant attitude, it is impossible to fully appreciate what people who are dissimilar from you have to offer.
Acceptance, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean agreeing with the type of lifestyle a person has chosen, but understanding that the person has his own reasons for behaving the way that he does. It is comprehension that your views are just as foreign to that person as his views are to you. Acceptance is not an act of submission, or indifference, but an act of respect and a demonstration of equality.
With this realization, I have come to develop a belief system that since everyone has developed under different genetic and environmental influences, they react in different manners to the same circumstances. I acknowledge our differences in opinions, but I do not allow those differences to impede me from forming close relationships with that person. Because of this, I have developed close friendships with people of many varying ethnic and ideological backgrounds.
Tolerance does not breed the unified society necessary to tackle the world's many problems. Acceptance does.
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