Are You Worthy of Respect?
by Keith J. Chouinard
Many people go by the mantra that “respect must be gained” –
This would imply that a person to be respected must gain that respect
by conditions that are expected of the person willing to offer the respect.
It would seem to state that another person is not respectable until
they have proven so to each person they encounter, or at least
in the case of the person who has a mantra claiming
respect must be gained.
Conditional respect seems to be the concept.
There are some that believe everyone is worthy of respect,
though some just make it harder for others to be willing to allow
them to see clearly enough through their circumstances to the
simple respect of being human. After all no one here is perfect,
we all have some sort of issue we deal with at some point in our lives.
Those that are submerged in difficulties so much that they
have lost their grounding can sometimes be the ones deserving the
utmost respect during their tribulations. Which brings to mind
that other mantra “all we need is love”.
Conditional respect tends to parallel the concept of
conditional love. Of all the people I have personally met in my short life,
conditional love seems not to be fully comprehended. People tell me
that they love unconditionally all the time. Yet, when you really get into
the depth of the subject with them you find conditions arise for them
that they hadn’t actually thought about before. To be able to accept
their new realization and still believe they love unconditionally
and to not feel the effect of the shift in their belief structure,
they alter the concept of what love is. Love then becomes some thing
you have to discover and take part in within someone,
not the simple idea of just being love and it being available to anyone
who wishes to feel it or share it.
The multidimensional aspect of love itself is possibly what makes
it confusing, for you love your parents, or hopefully you do.
You may love someone in the form of bonding sexually, and you may
love your work mates. Those are all different forms of expressing love.
All forms emitting energy from various parts of our being.
We give from ourselves what we are capable of at the time,
yet there is an unlimited amount of love in the universe for us
to be inspired and graced with.
