Just Accept It
Acceptance – Intolerance. Intolerance. Intolerance.
Intolerance towards people, their behavior, their way of life, their socializing skills, their dressing style, the way they talk, the way they walk and the way they are. Intolerance towards animals, environment, honesty, words, voices, rights, wrongs and everything in between. Why do we consider, someone else’s behavior is our responsibility? Where is our accountability for our behavior? Why do we get offended because of someone’s socializing skills? Why is his/her dress too revealing for our mindset? Why is our intolerance becoming someone else’s problem?
Humans have been gifted with the skill of converting thoughts into words and actions. We have ideas, opinions and creativity. As humans, we also have the problem of feeling entitled. We feel entitled to interfere in other people’s business, to pass judgement about their struggle and to destroy the very environment in which we exist. This entitlement leads to intolerance. We are entitled to our opinions, till we don’t enforce them on others. For a moment, let’s just remember that nobody owes us anything. Nobody owes it to us to be polite, or to care for us, or to be kind towards our struggle. When we go forward with this mindset, we become grateful to each and every human being, who has ever smiled at us, heard our struggle or respected our boundaries.
Intolerance towards things and situations might give us some solutions and help us solve some real problems but intolerance towards other living creatures is outrageous, destructive and pretty stupid. (In my “opinion”) Acceptance, on the other hand is always how a solution begins. Once we start addressing our negative thoughts and telling people that we feel a certain way, we begin to accept ourselves and those thoughts stop controlling us. Acceptance can work wonders if a society, as a whole can adopt it, as core value. We don’t have to show support, we don’t have to motivate anybody, we don’t need to go extra miles, we just need to tell ourselves that, “I don’t feel the need to change anybody as per my convenience, if I have a problem with someone/something, it is my responsibility and not anybody else’s.”
Acceptance can bring peace of mind, solve almost everything, through discussion, or healthy debate. We, as a society can attain peace of mind through acceptance towards each other and then find the solutions to some real problems using that peace of mind. Changing mindsets is the most difficult task, so that’s where we should begin. Let’s try to accept acceptance!
-Written by Urvi Shah