Curiously enough, it is precisely these persons of limited
experience who are most prone to prejudice. I have heard a man
assert with emphasis that it was every one's _duty_ to be happy, who
had apparently not a single thing in life to interfere with his own
happiness. The duty may be clear enough, but he certainly was not in
a position to recognize its difficulty. And just in proportion with
his inability to take another's point of view in such difficulty did
he miss his power to lead others to this agreeable duty.
There are, of course, innumerable things, little and big, which we
shall be enabled to give to others and to receive from others as the
true sympathy grows.
The common-sense of it all appeals to us forcibly.
Who wants to carry about a mass of personal prejudices when he can
replace them by the warm, healthy feeling of sympathetic friendship?
Who wants his nerves to be steadily irritated by various forms of
intolerance when, by understanding the other's point of view, he can
replace these by better forms of patience?
This lower relief is little compared with the higher power gained,
but it is the first step up, and the steps beyond go ever upward.
Human nature is worth knowing and worth loving, and it can never be
known or loved without open sympathy.
Why, we ourselves are human nature!
Many of us would be glad to give sympathy to others, especially in
little ways, but we do not know how to go to work about it; we seem
always to be doing the wrong thing, when our desire is to do the
right. This comes, of course, from the same inability to take the
other's point of view; and the ability is gained as we are quiet and
watch for it.
Practice, here as in everything else, is what helps. And the object
is well worth working for.
IX.
OTHERS.
HOW to live at peace with others is a problem which, if practically
solved, would relieve the nervous system of a great weight, and give
to living a lightness and ease that might for a time seem weirdly
unnatural. It would certainly decrease the income of the
nerve-specialists to the extent of depriving those gentlemen of many
luxuries they now enjoy.
Peace does not mean an outside civility with an inside dislike or
annoyance. In that case, the repressed antagonism not only increases
the brain-impression and wears upon the nervous system, but it is
sure to manifest itself some time, in one form or another; and the
longer it is repressed, the worse will be the effect. It may be a
volcanic eruption that is produced after long repression, which
simmers down to a chronic interior grumble; or it may be that the
repression has caused such steadily increasing contraction that an
eruption is impossible. In this case, life grows heavier and
heavier, burdened with the shackles of one's own dislikes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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