“In the end we are all separate: our stories, no matter how similar, come to a fork and diverge. We are drawn to each other because of our similarities, but it is our differences we must learn to respect.” 

Courtesy and respect are what help people live and work together and to get along with others. It has been said that “everything is gained and nothing is lost by courtesy.” Without courtesy and respect, we become selfish and strife occurs in our life’s. If we gain nothing else by being courteous and showing respect, we will gain friends.

Respect for and from others, and ourselves, is essential to our ability to interact with people in healthy and productive ways. Truly satisfying relationships require that we acknowledge, accept and value others and ourselves, respecting who we are as people and as individuals. Without respect, we lapse into power struggles within relationships. We lose morale, productivity and the ability to positively influence people in the workplace. We contribute to conflict in the world. 

Respect is honor. To honor someone is to treat that person as more important than yourself, regardless of how actually feel about them at the moment. Honor and respect are the outward tells of a person’s inner attitude, an attitude of humility. 

Whether it is your brother or a stranger, treating people with respect is important in creating a peaceful and tolerant society. When people are treated respectfully, they generally treat others in the same fashion. 

So why don’t we show respect more often to others when we want it so badly for ourselves?

We misunderstand, thinking that to show respect means that we agree with a person or that we must cater to that person’s whims. Not so. To respect means to acknowledge, accept and value them or their opinion, not necessarily to agree with or to indulge. 

We make assumptions and rush to judgment and deem them not worthy of our respect. 

We take things and people for granted. We can become complacent in our attitude and in our conversation. We can come to expect from them, versus appreciating them for whatever they do. It just as easy, when people do too much for us, to see them as a doormat, to think we are in control and have control over them. It can make us feel a sense of power and control. We can revert to verbal abuse to gain and maintain that feeling of control. 

We fear people with different thoughts, convictions and approaches. For some reason, we feel threatened by the differences. Diversity can add excitement and offer different options, views and perspective. How boring would the world be if we were all the same? 

We tend to generalize. When we see “all men” or “all women” or all people from one ethnic group as the same, we forget that each person is unique. We stereotype people and make decisions by what we have heard or an individual event in our lives, We don’t take the time to personally get involved and find out the truth for ourselves. That would require some investment on our part and some amount of risk. The truth is most of us don’t wont to take the risk, to be proven wrong. To realize our perspective and our reality is not as real as we once believed. It may require reevaluating our core beliefs and make us take a deeper, longer look at ourselves. This type of self evaluation may shake the very foundations of who we are, or at least who we thought we were.

We harden our hearts, closing ourselves off to compassion and empathy. It’s not that we need to disregard bad behavior or that we have to like every person and every action. But we show our respect and our strength by attempting to understand. There was a time when I looked down on certain lifestyles thinking I was above that, it wasn’t long before I found out differently. Today I reach out to those same people, I once looked down at and walked past without even a thought. I can empathize today and show compassion because I have been there, I can feel their pain, I can see the fear in their eyes, I can see the hollowness of those same eyes, and I know what its like to loose hope. To loose yourself. I reach out a helping hand today because it is my responsibility and because somebody was there to reach out to me. Whenever somebody reaches a hand out for help I want to be there to reach a hand back. They don’t need our sympathy they need our compassion and sometimes even our help. 

We get too busy. It today’s world we are all buying for time, trying to get in just a little more. Our time is limited and it is the most important thing to us. But, our time is not only important to us, it is equally important, if not more to others around us, especially our children. Our children and most people judge their worth and value by how much time someone is willing to give them.Try investing time: listen to others, recognize their contributions, and speak and act in ways that support and strengthen the people you love . The return on the investment could be phenomenal! With our children, as with others, we may never see the return in our checkbooks, but it will be recorded by prosperity.

 I think treating other’s with respect is one of the core concepts to the meaning of life for most of us. It is so important it is the secondary basis of the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments deal with our relationship with God, Himself, and the last six deal with our relationships with others. I know for me, it is very important, but is a struggle when it is someone who has a different opinion than my own. I need to keep it as something I am cognizant of and practice to the best of my ability. Respecting others and ourselves can enrich our lives like nothing else. When respect leads, curiosity follows and our world opens up. When self respect points the way, we take care of ourselves better, physically and emotionally. We feel better about ourselves, and we can receive the gift of respect others offer to us. 

“Their story, yours and mine – it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them”