TOLERANCE.

In my last post, I touched on some recent personal challenges, yes?

I took these challenges very personal and started to exhibit traits of teenage angst (even if my teenage years are over 2 decades behind me).

Last Friday, my colleague told me a story about a friend of his who would always ask him for money and typically with an emotional angle to his money request. My colleague paid all hospital bills for the birth of his 1st child, and then for his 2nd child (and had to chip in for the naming ceremony costs as well) and was again being contacted on that Friday to once more send some money as the 3rd child was on its way to the world.

My colleague was raving irritated. 

He showed me the text messages and I joined him in raining some choice insults at this friend of his who wouldn't grow a pair and take care of his personal business. In a very atypical mode, I even went as far as answering in the affirmative when my colleague asked if he was right to ignore his friend's pleas.

So there we were, in our plush cosy office, being completely intolerant to this man and his wife who in our opinion, were irresponsibly insistent on churning out babies.

I got into the office on Monday and saw my colleague looking rather morose. I asked what was wrong. He showed me yet another text from his friend.

His wife died.

She died.

And I was crushed.

Not because I gave advice for the money request to be ignored, no that wasn't really it. Apparently, the doctors couldn't have saved her even with access to all the gold in Fort Knox.

I was crushed because I had been intolerant of someone whose choices I had no business rationalizing. I had allowed the bitterness of my own personal struggles to overshadow my default setting of generosity and acceptance. I had judged someone I don't know, and worse still judged her harshly in what I didn't know were her final hours.

The world doesn't need that kind of behavior. 

Be who you are without hurting others. 

Respect others as they are, as long as they're not hurting you.

My style subject, she's fully and firmly Christian. But she admires and several times replicates the style of women of another faith. It's one way to look at acceptance as a whole. We could do with large doses of that, here in Lagos, in Nigeria and certainly world over.

The current refugee situation in Europe also comes to mind, but that's entirely another story for another day.

I'll leave you with these words:

"Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.”
― Lloyd Shearer, Walter Scott's Personality Parade