To tolerate means to consent, to allow, not to prevent. Tolerance is the act or effect of tolerating and being tolerant, in turn it is the person who commands or is commanded by this action. All this in theory and literally, because if we think about it in practice we can exemplify the meaning of tolerance as “allowing someone to be different from you, allowing a situation to get out of your control or even accepting your own faults”. How many times have you exercised your tolerance in the last few days?
Maybe your answer scares you, or maybe you can't even find an answer because you can't remember the situations you were tolerant of, if there were any. Unfortunately, we live in a routine that makes us leave aside the most beautiful conditions for a human being: empathy, sympathy, education, generosity, kindness, understanding and especially tolerance.
With the rush and fifty thousand things to deal with, we end up developing a gigantic egocentrism and we act as if everyone should act the way we expect, that things work out in our favor and even that we are never liable to failures or broken expectations. . It turns out that all this makes us an increasingly cold and inhuman person, which contributes to the world becoming even more acidic and everything turning into an endless cycle.
The first step in practicing tolerance more diligently on a day-to-day basis is recognizing the lack of this quality in your actions. If you realize that you could have been more tolerant, kind and understanding with someone or in some situation, that's the beginning of everything. Recognition makes us identify mistakes and start taking action to fix them.
If you lack tolerance for people, try to think of all of them as people close to you and very similar to you. They are also prone to mistakes, full of conflicting feelings and with some problems to work out in their heads. You probably don't know the battle they're facing, so before you say a rude word or do an unfriendly act, take a deep breath and put your tolerance into practice. Think that by treating someone with kindness you can make that person's day better and they will also exercise understanding with the next.
If your tolerance is lacking with yourself, it's just a matter of exercising self-knowledge and self-control. Have a serious conversation with yourself and recognize what bothers you and what makes you act so rude to you. Make an analysis of who you really are, what are your points to improve and why you always seek such expectations. Establish that you are a human being subject to failures and changes of opinion and way of acting. Don't be cruel to yourself, unfortunately, as we've already said, you'll probably come across someone in your day who will do this for you. Allow yourself to be tolerant of your ideas and love yourself, above all.
Think of tolerance as a flabby muscle. It needs to be exercised daily to become vigorous and admirable. In the beginning, constant exercise can even hurt, bother you and it will not be rare for you to feel like giving up, but I guarantee that if you insist on it, tolerance will be your best friend, in addition to the pride that will invade you.
Article written by Roberta Lopes from the Eu Sem Fronteiras Team
