Respect

Respect

Throughout January we have been talking about respect at the kung fu school. The most important message that I have taken away from it is that you need to give respect in order to get respect. In other words you can't expect to get more respect from other people than you give them.

We give people respect in our actions to them, the way we talk to them, even the way we dress ourselves when we meet others. Everyone is looking for respect from others and in making the first move we are more likely to receive it in return. This is something I tried last weekend with one of the girls in the highschool youth group I help run. It bothers me that frequently when I organize a game for them to play she will refuse to take part. After thinking about this during the evening I approached her towards the end and told her how much I respected her for not taking part even with all the peer pressure from the others. I told her it was great that she was so strong and could refuse to do something that was not OK with her. She received it well and it was a good exercise for me to think about how she may be feeling in the situation even though it was frustrating for me.

Another topic of conversation has been selective respect. This is when you respect someone for what they have achieved but their actions are not respectful. Many politicians are a good example of this; the position of President inherently deserves respect for example, but you can completely dislike his actions and the way he goes about doing everything. The key point here is that you should not get them confused and feel that you hate someone just because of their actions when their achievements really are worthy of respect. It is a challenging concept to get your head around.

The last thing I want to mention about respect is what happens when you have a lack of self-respect. It is a downward spiral where an individual begins to believe that they are not worthy of respect. This leads to self-abuse and a feeling of helplessness and depression. Our tenant-from-hell is exactly in this situation and she life keeps shitting on her from all directions - all of which is all of her own creation. We continually try to help her and she responds by trying to sue us to get money for her drug habit over and over again.

There is a lot of work still for me in the realm of respect, it is easy to give respect to those in positions of respect in the community and difficult to people who are not even respectful of yourself. I am trying to slow down a little and consider how I can treat people I interact with with more respect no matter what age.

Nick
Yellow sash