We are, at the present moment, in the middle of a change of consciousness. There’s a wave in which people are becoming aware of how important gratefulness is and how it can change our world.
Because if you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not from a sense of scarcity; you‘re willing to share. If you’re grateful, you enjoy the differences between people and you’re respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid on which we live.
Gratefulness doesn’t make for equality, but it makes for equal respect, and that is the important thing.
-David Rast
We all understand how stereotyping works.
We all understand we have unconscious biases.
We all understand that you can’t change the world, yourself or the other – overnight… if ever, but that’s a topic for another day.
Now biases are the stories we make up about people before we know who they actually are. But how will we know who they actually are when we’ve been told to avoid and be afraid of them?**
The thing is, we all have defaults. These defaults stem from our biases, our stereotypes, our fears. The only way to change a default, is to update your experience.
Expand your social circles, grow authentic relationships; it’s empathy and compassion that comes out of having relationships with people who are different from you.**
Because tolerating those whom we define as ‘different’ isn’t enough. To be honest, it’s not even enough to just help people; real change– is only possible when we understand that we need people who are not like us.*
So, what can we do? We can start by cherishing our shared humanity. We can begin by seeing how much we are alike. As Dumbledore said: we may come from different places and speak in different tongues, but our hearts beat as one.
The ask isn’t for altruism.
The ask is for compassion; and you don’t have to compromise your convictions to be compassionate.
My inspiration to synthesize this piece came from many internal monologues centered around compassion.
*Quote by Arthur Brooks
** Quote from Verna Meyers
VoraXious 