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Today's
Quotation:
Perhaps
the clearest and deepest meaning of brotherhood is
the ability
to
imagine yourself in the other person's position,
and then treat that
person as if you were him or her.
This
form of brotherhood takes
a lot of imagination,
a great
deal of sympathy, and a tremendous
amount of understanding.
Obert
C.
Tanner
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Today's
Meditation:
Have
you ever walked a mile in someone else's shoes? Have
you tried to see life from someone else's perspective, tried
to feel what that person feels and think what that person
thinks? If we could do so, I think that we'd find that
rudeness, selfishness, arrogance, and other traits that tend
to affect others so negatively result more from fears and
pain than
from anything else, and that these people's negative
behavior is a self-defense mechanism that they've adopted
because nobody's taught them yet about self-acceptance and
self-love.
If
children show signs of being afraid, such as crying and
hiding, we do our best to comfort them. We hug them,
and we try to calm them down. We give them our
sympathy and our love.
When
an adult shows signs of fear, though, in the form of
rudeness or obnoxiousness, we respond by trying to put that
person in his or her place. We have little sympathy,
and we often feel hurt or diminished by that person's
actions or words.
Have
you ever seen someone act in a way that was hurtful, and
then found out later that something drastic, such as the
death of a loved one, had just happened to that
person? Once we have an explanation for the behavior,
it's not just acceptable, but understandable.
Obert
is asking us to look for that explanation for
everyone. Imagine being that person, having his job,
working with her co-workers, dealing with children who are
getting in trouble, trying to recover from a childhood with
an abusive parent, still hurt by that painful divorce, still
diminished from being laid off from work. This is how
we can truly prove our desire to help others--by
understanding even those who don't even seem to need our
understanding.
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