R E S P E C T

Respect. What is it? Why is it important? How do we respect ourselves? How do we show our respect for others? What does it mean to respect? If we recognize that God is within us and that we have been given a gift called life – how do we say thank you and show our gratitude to God and to ourselves in the process. If we started with accepting our life as a gift, a finite amount of time, that is so precious and yet so powerful, so frail and yet so exponential in its potential – to heal, to comfort, to love, to forgive, to teach, to learn. If we truly spend time meditating on what a rare opportunity a hundred years on planet Earth is, maybe we would be better able to view our shining selves as a gift and less time beating ourselves up and living in fear. Well, crap, I might as well take advantage, to try, to have fun, to enjoy, to think, to feel, to love and to do it up right. 

Last night I was pondering the priority of things. This coming from someone that loves me some emotions, feelings and thoughts:

• To Do 
• To Think
• To Feel

I have gotten so lost in my power to feel, my power to think, that I have forgotten along the way that the most important of these is to do. To Do and to never stop trying To Do, until I simply can’t do anymore, and then to have faith in myself, my love, my God that in whatever way I can, after my physical being has ceased to be in this heavenly here and now, that I will keep trying to do for those I love and anyone else in need. 

To come back to this present moment and the concept of respect and doing, thinking and feeling. I am a firm believer in what you do, and I include ‘say’ in do, matters. Think of why you respect other people. For me, I’ve learned and am continually learning to respect people more for their actions and learning to focus less, even when it hurts, on what they think and feel. Your actions, your way of being, are more important than what you think or feel. My actions are even more important than what I say. And that is hard and challenging to accept that fact and yet when I do, it can be very helpful, loving and encouraging in my own journey of self-acceptance and forgiving myself. I learn to believe in the redemptive power of my actions to become a little bit better of a human being and to make the world a little bit brighter and a better other place for others. I think that by getting so overly lost in feelings and thoughts, my actions have fallen off. Like any good muscle, if it’s not used, it atrophies and fear and anxiety replace what was once muscle.

One of the books that I’ve read along the way exemplifies what I’m trying to say best. The book was about ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) especially as it relates to confidence. The exercise in the book was to silently tell myself in my head not to lift my arm over and over again. Don’t lift my arm. Don’t lift my arm. Over and over and over. Then about halfway through, simply lift my arm. Voila. My mind, as powerful and magical as it is, cannot prevent me from taking actions in the real world. How simple and yet freaking hopeful is that to remember? Think of it in relation to fear and anxiety vs. action. I could tell myself 20 times in my mind that I’m scared sh*tless about doing what needs to get done, and then simply walk out the door and do it. Doing is greater than thinking. There is a confidence from acting rather than treating the ‘thought’ and ‘feeling’ as the most powerful decider of my fate. The actions of confidence come first. The feelings of confidence come afterwards.

Back to respect. Treat yourself with respect. You are a gift from God. Respect your mind. Respect your body. Respect yourself. Respect your failures and your imperfections. In doing so, you will begin to view others as gifts too. See others as human beings, who just like you, are trying their best. Think of respect in terms of the ugliness of racism. Instead of being so defensive in attempting to prove all the ways that I’m not racist, what happens when I respect my flaws enough to accept my inherent racism and biases as a white male? By accepting the ugliness of my imperfections, I can use that heightened awareness to try and listen more, to try and learn more about other ways of viewing the world through Black, Latino, and Asian experiences and vantage points.  

To accept that my sliver of life is limited in scope, in its ability to see and to know is a blessing, a huge benefit. It reminds me that I need to listen more, observe more in order to be more accepting of others and more tolerant. To understand, more than to be understood. And it all started – not by telling myself that I’m an awful person – but accepting that I am not omniscient and I don’t know everything and therefore have to accept and be open to the fact that there are multiple views of this shared reality. Truly see others as human beings, who just like me, have their own fears, doubt pains, sadnesses and would like to be heard to be understood just like me. Respect is shown in the way I listen. Respect is shown in the way I try to understand. Respect is in the way I forgive others too for being imperfect. These are loving and respectful actions. Listen to yourself. Try to understand yourself better too. What would help my mind? How does my mind even work? What are the awesome powers of as well as the shortcomings, biases, limitations of my brain? How does my body work and what does it need right now? What is my spirit thirsting for? What does God want me to do with this gift he and or she has given me? Respect.